From Gatsby to Next but still static

My last article was almost a year ago! I haven't given up, but as a true programmer, I've been doing more on the technical side than the actual content. If you can relate, you must be the type of people that is always unsatisfied with the tool and very slow when it comes to producing something with it. Anyway, in this case, I wanted this blog to be multilingual, since the first articles I wrote, back in 2012, were in French but I switched to English at some point. Also, I've been writing a few articles in Japanese to exercise more on the writing side and some of them might also fit in here.

This blog has been powered by different engines throughout the years starting with Wordpress, moving to a simpler Jekyll static site and then Gatsby. And now I'm moving to Next. After working a bit with it, I concluded that it was so much easier to bend it towards what I needed. While Gatsby is nice when you don't do much outside the bounds, it can become cumbersome when you're expecting a bit more. The only downside I found to Next all those previous years was the path routes you had to specify in the config files to get a static site, I found it ugly. But in a recent update they introduce new methods to collocate the dynamic paths right with their page templates.

The good

So I started my Next project right in the Gatsby one, removing all those spread configs files down to just a few ones. Because I was using a pre-built template, I still had to keep some things like rucksack and lost grid. Maybe I'll get rid of those later. I got it working quickly without the articles. Then I headed onto the most important.

Within the file [...slug].jsx which catches every path not predefined and the brand new getStaticPaths method, you can specify which dynamic paths you want to be rendered, that's where you have to query your filesystem to get the articles. With a few lines, you can get it working.

What is great with that, it's the complete freedom on where the data comes from and which paths you want to generate. So if I change my data structure let's say to {year}/{month}/{day}/... instead later, I can come back, change a few lines and the result will be the same. Now that is working exactly as before. Let's add the internationalization now!

So you get all the paths you need and if the article is not available in English, we'll have to redirect to the first locale we find.

Getting the homepage list of articles with the other available languages is pretty much the same work since we need to find the alternatives but instead of just specifying the path, you load the content of said article within getStaticProps.

You can also match the languages and add some data to the list, if you want to see how it's done you can look at the file on GitHub. I made it so all the article are displayed on the homepage but the language is specified if it's not English and alternative languages links are also available.

The bad

Before going on, let's just dig something, Markdown imports. Next is built on top of Webpack which can imports all sorts of files as long as you have something called a loader for it. Colocating the assets' articles and the article itself was something Gatsby plugins used to do, but I didn't find anything satisfying for Next and after taking example on the remark-loader, I've built my tiny loader based on the html-loader using the remarkable parser.

It's not that good but it's working, I might come back to it later.

The ugly

The paths are generated and you also get the articles within the homepage but now we need to match the URL to the content. getStaticProps receives a parameter containing params which is what we specified in getStaticPaths.

We can use the parameter to do our loading strategy (nothing new here) but we need to specify the need for redirection when English is not available (that will support old URLs). Just use the props within the component:

Now.sh

Finally, I used to host the blog on Netlify (which is great) but Now is made my the same people making Next and the project doesn't have to be exported to a static website to work on it even though it could. It is just statically optimized at build time.

And that's it! I moved my blog to Next and it's multilingual! You can check this article's French version by clicking the FR link or button on top of the article.