netlify-templates/nextjs-blog-theme

A customizable blog starter using:

• Next.js v12
• Tailwind v3.0
• Built-in MDX v1 support
• Includes modern design with dark & light themes

Take a gander at the demo.

Click here to watch the template walkthrough!

Table of Contents:

• Getting Started
  • Setting Up Locally
  • Using the Wizard
• Configuring the Blog
• Adding New Posts
• Testing
  • Included Default Testing
  • Removing Renovate
  • Removing Cypress

Getting Started

You can get started with this project in two ways: locally or using the setup wizard.

Setting Up Locally

If you're doing it locally, start with clicking the use this template button on GitHub. This will create a new repository with this template's files on your GitHub account. Once that is done, clone your new repository and navigate to it in your terminal.

From there, you can install the project's dependencies by running:

yarn install

Finally, you can run your project locally with:

yarn run dev

Open your browser and visit http://localhost:3000, your project should be running!

Using the Setup Wizard

Through the setup wizard, you can create your blog in a few clicks and deploy to Netlify.

Configuring the blog

The config is based on environment variables to make it easy to integrate with any Jamstack platform, like Netlify.

Here are the variables you can edit:

All of the env variables can be configured through the Wizard or through setting the project's environment variables. You can do this in your Netlify dashaboard (Site settings/Build & deploy/Environment/Environment variables).

[alt: video walkthrough of editing env vars]

If setting an environment variable isn't your cup of tea, the defaults can be changed in utils/global-data.js. You can also remove the variables and hard code blog information where these variables are used in the code base.

• BLOG_THEME, BLOG_FONT_HEADINGS, & BLOG_FONT_PARAGRAPHS are used in tailwind-preset.js
• BLOG_NAME, BLOG_TITLE, BLOG_FOOTER_TEXT are used in pages/index.js & pages/posts/[slug].js through the globalData object.

Adding new posts

All posts are stored in /posts directory. To make a new post, create a new file with the .mdx extension.

Since the posts are written in MDX format you can pass props and components. That means you can use React components inside your posts to make them more interactive. Learn more about how to do so in the MDX docs on content.

[alt: video walkthrough of adding a new blog post]

Testing

Included Default Testing

We’ve included some tooling that helps us maintain these templates. This template currently uses:

• Renovate - to regularly update our dependencies
• Cypress - to run tests against how the template runs in the browser
• Cypress Netlify Build Plugin - to run our tests during our build process

If your team is not interested in this tooling, you can remove them with ease!

Removing Renovate

In order to keep our project up-to-date with dependencies we use a tool called Renovate. If you’re not interested in this tooling, delete the renovate.json file and commit that onto your main branch.

Removing Cypress

For our testing, we use Cypress for end-to-end testing. This makes sure that we can validate that our templates are rendering and displaying as we’d expect. By default, we have Cypress not generate deploy links if our tests don’t pass. If you’d like to keep Cypress and still generate the deploy links, go into your netlify.toml and delete the plugin configuration lines:

[[plugins]]
  package = "netlify-plugin-cypress"
-  [plugins.inputs.postBuild]
-    enable = true
-
-  [plugins.inputs]
-    enable = false

If you’d like to remove the netlify-plugin-cypress build plugin entirely, you’d need to delete the entire block above instead. And then make sure sure to remove the package from the dependencies using:

npm uninstall -D netlify-plugin-cypress

And lastly if you’d like to remove Cypress entirely, delete the entire cypress folder and the cypress.config.ts file. Then remove the dependency using:

npm uninstall cypress