Host a Next.js SSR React app on Cloud Functions for Firebase with Firebase Hosting.

Here is the accompanying Medium PostA new post is being written to describe the new project structure, Firebase partial deployments, Firebase support of pre/post-deploy hooks and what problems these new features solve.

Host your SSR Next.js app on Cloud Functions enabling a low-cost, auto-scaling SSR app experience leveraging Firebase's sweet developer experience.

Firebase Hosting can rewrite routes to a Cloud Function that serves our Server-side Rendered Next.js app. Using a rewrite rule that catches ALL routes we can then host our SSR app on our Firebase Hosting URL instead of the Firebase Cloud Function URL.

instead of:

https://us-central1-<project-name>.cloudfunctions.net/<function-name>

we can use:

<project-name>.firebaseapp.com/

Next.js can then be used to achieve SSR React with Hot-Module Reloading, server and client-side routing, route level code-splitting, route prefetching and more!

A number of issues with Hosting SSR on Firebase were overcome with this method. Please refer to the Medium Post before creating issues here.

• This example uses firebase-tools as a devDependency which is run from the node_modules/.bin/ folder via yarn. Yarn will run scripts from either the package.json or binary scripts from node_modules/.bin/. npm run does not check the .bin folder for executables, so if you use npm you will either have to change the scripts to explicitly run the firebase binary from node_modules/.bin/ or install firebase-tools globally and remove it from the devDeps list. Have a look at the Next.js repo's example for how I recommend using npm.

• Ensure you're running Node 6.11.5 as the functions emulator requires this. I recommend asdf as a version manager and have add an asdf .tool-versions file to define the Node runtime.

• If using _app.js you may receive the following error on your deployed Cloud Function:

  { Error: Cannot find module '@babel/runtime/regenerator'...
  

  Despite next.js having @babel/runtime as a dependency, you must install it as a dependency directly in this project.

git clone https://github.com/jthegedus/firebase-functions-next-example
cd firebase-functions-next-example
yarn install

This is used as a dev-dependency instead of a global install. I've found this to be a much nicer dev experience.

yarn fblogin

Standard Next.js development with Hot-module Reloading etc

yarn dev

yarn serve

This finally works now! Note: you must have a valid Firebase project id defined in the .firebaserc file as the serve command does check that the project exists. I believe this is to do with ensuring the relative routes align with your deployed application as the <project id> is used in your URLs.

For those who want to dig deeper into what's actually happening here run this command:

yarn serve --debug

You will need to connect the project to your Firebase project. Edit the name in .firebaserc or run firebase init and choose not to override any files.

yarn deploy-app

Deploy all functions specified in the function group. Edit this script to add more function groups. - see Partial deploys docs for how to use function groups.

yarn deploy-funcs

yarn deploy-all

yarn clean

Everything was tested on Ubuntu 17.04 with Bash. This should work on Bash on Ubuntu on Windows without any changes. If you wish for Windows native support please submit an issue so we can work on Windows compatibility. Please report any macOS errors as I do not have access to a device to test. My development environment can be found here.