Welcome to the exciting world of Next.js! Before we dive into building amazing applications, we need to ensure our development environment is set up correctly. This section will guide you through the essential steps to get your Next.js project up and running smoothly. We'll cover prerequisites, installation, and a quick verification to make sure everything is in order.
The primary requirement for running Next.js is having Node.js installed on your machine. Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that allows you to execute JavaScript code outside of a web browser. Most modern Next.js applications require a recent version of Node.js. We recommend installing the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version.
You can download Node.js from its official website: https://nodejs.org/. The installer will also include npm (Node Package Manager), which is crucial for managing your project's dependencies.
To verify that Node.js and npm are installed correctly, open your terminal or command prompt and run the following commands:
node -v
npm -vThis should output the installed versions of Node.js and npm, confirming they are ready to go.
Now, let's create your first Next.js application. The simplest and most recommended way to do this is by using create-next-app, a command-line interface (CLI) tool that sets up a new Next.js project with a sensible default configuration.
Open your terminal in the directory where you want to create your project and run the following command. Replace my-nextjs-app with your desired project name:
npx create-next-app@latest my-nextjs-appThe create-next-app command will prompt you with a few questions to configure your project. For a basic setup, you can accept the default options for most questions. Here's a general idea of what you might be asked: