Nerve: A hybrid Next.js & Serve server

This is a development tool for Next.js based projects that are destined for static export and serving using Zeit's Now static hosting (which uses serve-handler under the hood).

Specifically, nerve will read a configuration, apply the static rules (like headers and redirects) to requests and serve your Next.js project.

Important: this tool is only for the development phase.

Motivation

I wanted to serve a service-worker.js from the root of the project, which I could do once I had exported the Next project, but not during development. I had a server but it was the same boilerplate so I decided to codify my solution.

Usage

Install Nerve as a dev dependency or a global dependencies and run the executable nerve command in your Next.js project directory:

$ npm install --global @remy/nerve
$ nerve

DONE  Compiled successfully in 2585ms
INFO: Discovered configuration in `now.json`

Important caveat

The config setting "trailingSlash" must be set to false during development. This is because when the client side Next.js HMR looks for the URL to monitor, it does without a trailing slash, and by adding a / - Next responds with a 404.

Example

Once nerve is running, I can test with the curl command:

$ curl http://localhost:3000 -I # response from Next handler
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Powered-By: Next.js 6.1.1
Cache-Control: no-store, must-revalidate
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8

$ curl http://localhost:3000/service-worker.js -I # response from serve config
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Disposition: inline; filename="service-worker.js"
Content-Type: application/javascript; charset=utf-8
Cache-Control: no-cache

And the now.json config I'm using:

{
  "type": "static",
  "static": {
    "trailingSlash": false,
    "headers": [
      {
        "source": "/static/service-worker.js",
        "headers": [
          {
            "key": "Cache-Control",
            "value": "no-cache"
          }
        ]
      }
    ],
    "rewrites": [
      {
        "source": "/service-worker.js",
        "destination": "/static/service-worker.js"
      },
    ]
  }
}

Config support

Nerve, as per serve, will for a config in package.json, now.json and serve.json (note that Nerve does not support command line arguments).

A full list of options can be seen here

License

• MIT / https://rem.mit-license.org