amirardalan.com

A Next.js Markdown Blog and CMS written in TypeScript. Designed, built, and maintained by @amirardalan

Primarily Built with:

Next.js
Next Auth
react-markdown
Prisma
SWR
Emotion

Who is this for?

This is my personal portfolio and blog. You may find the CMS portion and some of the custom Markdown functionality useful. This application currently runs on Next13 using the Page directory paradigm. I plan to upgrade this project to the app directory to take advantage of full React 18 support in the near future.

CMS Features

Manage blog posts from an authenticated Admin Panel
Write blog posts with extensible Markdown
Publish changes on per-page basis, no need to rebuild the entire application
Create and manage unpublished Drafts
Publish, unpublish, and delete Posts/Drafts
Set/Edit Title, Teaser, Slug, Content, and Category
Set a featured post. If no post is featured, use the latest post as a fallback.
Optionally suppress "Updated" date when editing
Upload images to Cloudinary and a markdown URL is auto inserted into the blog post content.
Browse your Cloudinary Media Library and delete or insert images into blog posts

Setup:

Manifest.json

Update public/manifest.json. Fill out information relevant to your web app.
Note: I've ommited theme_color to allow Safari to match the background and notch area according to the app background color, which works great for light and dark mode. Hopefully w3c will officially add a way to control this ourselves in the future.

Environment Variables

Create an .env file for local environment variables.

Keep this file private, ensure .env remains in .gitignore, don't commit to a public repository. You will need to set up different environment varibles for Development and Production instances. Omit wrapping quotes for all variable values.

//.env

NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL=http://localhost:3000
NEXT_PUBLIC_USER_EMAIL=you@email.com

DATABASE_URL=postgresql://xxxxx

NEXT_AUTH_SECRET=
GITHUB_SECRET=
GITHUB_ID=

NEXT_PUBLIC_REVALIDATE_SECRET=
NEXT_PUBLIC_TIMEZONE=America/Los_Angeles

CLOUDINARY_NAME=
CLOUDINARY_API_KEY=
CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET=

NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL Leave as http://localhost:3000 for Development, set as https://yourDomainName.com for Production

NEXT_PUBLIC_USER_EMAIL Your email address, used for authentication and optionally your about or contact page.

DATABASE_URL The URL for your PostgreSQL database

NEXT_AUTH_SECRET Generate a secret for Next Auth

GITHUB_SECRET For GitHub oAuth with Next Auth, see GitHub Developer App Docs

GITHUB_ID Your GitHub developer app ID, GitHub Developer App Docs

NEXT_PUBLIC_REVALIDATE_SECRET Generate a secret for use with Next On-Demand Incremental Static Regeneration

NEXT_PUBLIC_TIMEZONE: Example: America/Los_Angeles. Set this to your local timezone for your blog posts to display the correct date and time. Full List of IANA Timezones

CLOUDINARY_NAME: Your Cloudinary Media Library name (cloud-name)

CLOUDINARY_API_KEY: See Cloudinary's Admin API reference

CLOUDINARY_API_SECRET: See Cloudinary's Admin API reference

Install Dependencies

npm install

Configure Prettier

If you'd like to contribute to this project or use Prettier with your fork, download the VSCode Extension.

After installing the extension, open the extensions panel in VSCode, find Prettier - Code Formatter, click on the gear icon, and select Extension Settings.
Inside of the Prettier Extension Settings, locate Prettier: Config Path and ensure it is set to .prettierrc.json.

Start the Development Server

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000

Generate and Run a Static Test Build

Create a local copy of a production build (useful for testing on-demand ISR, pages/sitemap.xml.tsx configuration), and Lighthouse performance:

npm run test

Prisma ORM:

Prisma is a middleware that connects your Next.js application to an external database. Prisma has powerful queries that make accessing and passing data to props simple.

The existing schema is configured for PostgreSQL. Update accordingly.
Update schema and push new tables to db from schema.prisma:

npx prisma db push

Run Prisma Studio:

npx prisma studio

Open http://localhost:5555/

Next/Image Component

Utilize Next/Image functionality within Markdown by using custom metastrings inside the Markdown Alt. Retain the terseness of pure Markdown while getting the benefits of the Next/Image component without having to mix in JSX.

![AltText {caption: Photo credit: Some Person}{priority}{768x432}](/path-to-image.jpg)

Define image width and height: {Width x Height}
Optionally set image as {priority} to utilize Next.js preloading for images above the fold.
Add an optional caption that displays beneath the image.

Code Line Highlighting

```JSX {3,5-8} ...

Individually highlight specific lines of code using a space after the language declaration followed by this JSON metastring. Highlight individual lines and/or a range of contiguous lines, separated by commas.

Heading Anchors

H3 headings in a blog post automatically generate an anchor link from a generated slug based on the heading contents. Seamlessly handles code inside headings.

Link Behavior

[internal link](/blog/my-blog-post)
[external link](https://example.com)

External links will automatically render with target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" and open in a new tab
Internal links are handled normally

iFrame Embed Support

Out of the box configuration of iframe embeds within markdown.
Uses Rehype Raw. Disable if using this code in a way where you may not be able to trust the markdown.

Dynamically Generate Blog OG Images

This project uses Vercel OG Image Service to dynamically generate images for blog posts. If the first line of a blog post is an image, it will be used as the background image. Otherwise, the Open Graph API route will dynamically generate an image based on the blog post title, description, and a thumbnail.png background image.

Ensure NEXT_PUBLIC_SITE_URL is set in your .env.local file.
You will also need to add your own thumbnail.png background image in the public folder (1200x627).
See pages/api/og.tsx and components/Container.tsx for the full image generation functionality.

Additional Notes

Most static content can be edited in data/content.ts
Currently blog categories are manually set in data/categories.ts
For blog image hosting, I recommend Cloudinary's Free Digital Asset Manager
This project is the culmination of thousands of hours of work. It's primarily open-source for educational purposes. If you intend to use parts of the code, please create your own design and content!
If you have any questions, reach out to me on Twitter!

Inspiration:

Lee Robinson

@Mozzius

gottaegbert/amirardalanwebfork