Convex Next.js App Router Demo

This example app showcases Convex backend powering a Next.js app.

The app is a realtime social network with a limit of 20 characters per post (who needs more?). There are three pages:

• The home feed and author feed pages are dynamic and use client components. You can sign in with Github (via Clerk) to make new posts on the home feed.
• The single post page is using server components and SSR to render a post.

The demo includes server-side validation and rate limiting.

See it live here: https://convex-nextjs-app-router-demo.vercel.app/

Setting up

Run:

npm install
npm run dev

This will guide you through making a Convex project.

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser to see the result.

Environment variables

To test signing in with Clerk and making posts, follow these steps:

1. Follow the first 3 steps from the Get Started guide for Clerk.
2. Instead of pasting your Issuer URL to the config file add an environment variable CLERK_JWT_ISSUER_DOMAIN with the Issuer URL to your Deployment Settings on the Convex dashboard
3. In your .env.local file add a variable NEXT_PUBLIC_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY with your Publishable Key (see step 7 of the Get Started guide)

You can start editing the page by modifying app/page.tsx. The page auto-updates as you edit the file.

This project uses next/font to automatically optimize and load Inter, a custom Google Font.

What is Convex?

Convex is a hosted backend platform with a built-in database that lets you write your database schema and server functions in TypeScript. Server-side database queries automatically cache and subscribe to data, powering a realtime useQuery hook in our React client. There are also Python, Rust, ReactNative, and Node clients, as well as a straightforward HTTP API.

The database support NoSQL-style documents with relationships and custom indexes (including on fields in nested objects).

The query and mutation server functions have transactional, low latency access to the database and leverage our v8 runtime with determinism guardrails to provide the strongest ACID guarantees on the market: immediate consistency, serializable isolation, and automatic conflict resolution via optimistic multi-version concurrency control (OCC / MVCC).

The action server functions have access to external APIs and enable other side-effects and non-determinism in either our optimized v8 runtime or a more flexible node runtime.

Functions can run in the background via scheduling and cron jobs.

Development is cloud-first, with hot reloads for server function editing via the CLI. There is a dashbord UI to browse and edit data, edit environment variables, view logs, run server functions, and more.

There are built-in features for reactive pagination, file storage, reactive search, https endpoints (for webhooks), streaming import/export, and runtime data validation for function arguments and database data.

Everything scales automatically, and it’s free to start.