justyeethan/Flask-Next-template

Template to have Flask serve as Next.js server

Next.js Flask Starter Updated by Ethan

Simple Next.js boilerplate that uses Flask as the API backend.

Introduction

This is a hybrid Next.js + Python app that uses Next.js as the frontend and Flask as the API backend. One great use case of this is to write Next.js apps that use Python AI libraries on the backend.

This was re-factored to include a lot of nice to have elements such as React query, better structured Flask App, better UI, memoization/caching optimizations, etc. right out of the box.

How It Works

The Python/Flask server is mapped into to Next.js app under /api/.

This is implemented using next.config.js rewrites to map any request to /api/:path* to the Flask API, which is hosted in the /api folder.

On localhost, the rewrite will be made to the 127.0.0.1:5328 port, which is where the Flask server is running.

In production, the Flask server is hosted as Python serverless functions on Vercel.

Developing Locally

You can clone & create this repo with the following command

npx create-next-app nextjs-flask --example "https://github.com/vercel/examples/tree/main/python/nextjs-flask"

Getting Started

First, install the dependencies:

npm install
# or
yarn
# or
pnpm install

Then, run the development server:

npm run dev
# or
yarn dev
# or
pnpm dev

Open http://localhost:3000 with your browser to see the result.

The Flask server will be running on http://127.0.0.1:5328 – feel free to change the port in package.json (you'll also need to update it in next.config.js).