Custom App

Note: Next.js 13 introduces the app/ directory (beta). This new directory has support for layouts, nested routes, and uses Server Components by default. Inside app/, you can fetch data for your entire application inside layouts, including support for more granular nested layouts (with colocated data fetching).

Learn more about incrementally adopting app/.

Next.js uses the App component to initialize pages. You can override it and control the page initialization and:

• Persist layouts between page changes
• Keeping state when navigating pages
• Custom error handling using componentDidCatch
• Inject additional data into pages
• Add global CSS

To override the default App, create the file ./pages/_app.js as shown below:

export default function MyApp({ Component, pageProps }) {
  return <Component {...pageProps} />
}

The Component prop is the active page, so whenever you navigate between routes, Component will change to the new page. Therefore, any props you send to Component will be received by the page.

pageProps is an object with the initial props that were preloaded for your page by one of our data fetching methods, otherwise it's an empty object.

The App.getInitialProps receives a single argument called context.ctx. It's an object with the same set of properties as the context object in getInitialProps.

Caveats

• If your app is running and you added a custom App, you'll need to restart the development server. Only required if pages/_app.js didn't exist before.
• Adding a custom getInitialProps in your App will disable Automatic Static Optimization in pages without Static Generation.
• When you add getInitialProps in your custom app, you must import App from "next/app", call App.getInitialProps(appContext) inside getInitialProps and merge the returned object into the return value.
• App does not support Next.js Data Fetching methods like getStaticProps or getServerSideProps. If you need global data fetching, consider incrementally adopting the app/ directory.

TypeScript

If you’re using TypeScript, take a look at our TypeScript documentation.

Related

For more information on what to do next, we recommend the following sections: