How Next.js Works

Before you learn more advanced Next.js features, it would be helpful to understand the basics of how Next.js works.

At the beginning of this course, we talked about how React is relatively unopinionated about how you build and structure your applications - there are multiple ways to build applications with React. Next.js provides a framework to structure your application, and optimizations that help make both the development process and final application faster.

In the next sections, we’ll look at what happens to your application code during these different stages:

• The environment where your code runs: Development vs. Production
• When your code runs: Build Time vs. Runtime
• Where rendering happens: Client vs. Server

Now let’s dive deeper into these concepts and discuss some of the processes Next.js is doing behind the scenes.