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Next.js: run code only on the server side or client side in Next.js

How to write code that's only executed on one side of your stack: frontend or backend

In your page components, you can execute code only in the server-side or on the client-side, but checking the window property.

This property is only existing inside the browser, so you can check

if (typeof window === 'undefined') {
}

and add the server-side code in that block.

Similarly, you can execute client-side code only by checking

if (typeof window !== 'undefined') {
}

JS Tip: We use the typeof operator here because we can’t detect a value to be undefined in other ways. We can’t do if (window === undefined) because we’d get a “window is not defined” runtime error

Next.js, as a build-time optimization, also removes the code that uses those checks from bundles. A client-side bundle will not include the content wrapped into a if (typeof window === 'undefined') {} block.


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