Since Next can render your React component in the server all components have an special lifecycle event called getInitialProps.

This function accept asyncronous code so you can easily fetch data from a remote resource, like an http request.

Let's extend our Home page to fetch a list of users from the jsonplaceholder API.

The component will receive a users prop with an array of objects, every object with the user information. You can use the map method to iterate over the users and display the name of each one.

function Home({ users }) {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Users</h1>
      {users.map(user => (
        <p key={user.id}>{user.name}</p>
      ))}
    </div>
  );
}

export default Home;

Now you need to pass the users prop and in this moment the getInitialProps enter to the stage.

function Home({ users }) {
  return (
    <div>
      <h1>Users</h1>
      {users.map(user => (
        <p key={user.id}>{user.name}</p>
      ))}
    </div>
  );
}

async function getInitialProps() {
  const response = await fetch("https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/users");
  const users = await response.json();
  return { users };
}

Home.getInitialProps = getInitialProps;

export default Home;

You must return a javascript plain object and next will inject as props to the component. This method is only allowed to use in pages components, not a regular ones. If you try this it is going to throw an error.

ReferenceError: fetch is not defined

And this is because the getInitialProps is executed on the server, and node does not have a native fetch method like the browser have. One alternative is using a library like axios, supertest, superagent, etc. But in this case I am going to use node-fetch, because I do not want to change the above code.

npm install node-fetch

And now you need to add one line of code to the component importing node-fetch

import fetch from 'node-fetch';

And if you open your browser at http://localhost:3000 you will see a list of users loaded from an external API over http.