Now we know how to create a pretty decent Next.js app and get the full advantage of the Next.js routing API.
In practice, we usually need to fetch data from a remote data source. Next.js comes with a standard API to fetch data for pages. We do it using an async function called getInitialProps
.
getInitialProps
can only be added to the default component exported by a page, adding it to any other component won't work.
With getInitialProps
, we can fetch data for a given page via a remote data source and pass it as props to our page. getInitialProps
needs to work on both server and client; since it is called in both environments.
In this lesson, using getInitialProps
, we are going to build an app which shows information about Batman TV Shows, utilising the public TVmaze API.
Let's get started.