Next.js Route Handlers

Introduction

Next.js is a popular open-source React framework that is used for server-side rendering, static site generation, and building web applications. Next.js allows us to define route handlers, which are functions that handle requests for specific routes and generate corresponding responses. In this tutorial, we will learn how to define route handlers for our Next.js applications.

Syntax

// pages/api/sample.js
export default function handler(req, res) {
  // request handler logic goes here
}

Example

Here is an example of how we can define a simple route handler in Next.js:

// pages/api/sample.js
export default function handler(req, res) {
  res.status(200).json({ message: 'Hello from Next.js route handler!' });
}

Output

When we run our Next.js application and navigate to the route /api/sample, we will see the following JSON response:

{
  "message": "Hello from Next.js route handler!"
}

Explanation

In the above example, we define a simple route handler function that takes req and res objects as arguments. The req argument represents the incoming HTTP request, while the res argument represents the outgoing HTTP response.

We then call the res.status(200).json({ message: 'Hello from Next.js route handler!' }) method that sets the HTTP status code to 200 and sends a JSON response to the browser.

Use

We can use route handlers to handle various types of requests in our Next.js applications, such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, and more. We can use these route handlers to perform various operations, such as fetching data from a database, modifying data, handling user authentication, and much more.

Important Points

• Route handlers in Next.js are defined in files located under the pages/api directory.
• Route handlers should be default exports of a module and should be named handler.
• Route handlers should be pure functions that take req and res arguments and perform the necessary operations to handle the request and send a response.

Summary

In this tutorial, we learned how to define route handlers in Next.js applications. We saw how to define a simple route handler that sends a JSON response to the browser. We also saw how we can use these route handlers to handle various types of requests, input validation, user authentication, and more. With these basics, we can create robust and feature-rich Next.js applications using route handlers.