The biggest challenge I encountered during Next.js development was the lack of hot reloading when using a D1 database locally. We have to use experimental-edge when using getServerSideProps.

Development is time consuming! npm run dev will not give D1 database bindings

I have to rebuild the entire project every time I make a change, even a minor one. This can be very time-consuming.

I managed to complete sharejson.com because it's a single-page application with only one table. However, for larger projects with more tables, I wouldn't recommend using D1 due to the significant development time required. It simply doesn't feel efficient in these scenarios.

Test your Next.js application with hot reload while mocking database responses and test the database logic later to make development easier.

Setting up Nextjs Pages & D1 Database

npm create cloudflare@latest my-next-app -- --framework=next

Creates a new Next.js project with pages setup. Once we have the wrangler cli , we can directly deploy app.

We have to change the env.d.ts for bindings.

declare global {
  namespace NodeJS {
    interface ProcessEnv {
      [key: string]: string | undefined;
      DATABASE: D1Database;
    }
  }
}
export { };

After signing up with Cloudflare, you can create a database on their platform and access environment variables. Add wrangler.toml file with D1 details.

[[d1_databases]]
binding = "DATABASE"
database_name = "db"
database_id = "database-id-from-website"

I've isolated database operations in the src/server folder. However, the db variable remains undefined during npm run dev as hot reloading isn't supported. For database access, use npm run pages:dev, but be aware that this disables hot reloading.

const db = process.env.DATABASE

export const selectFromJsons = async (id: string) => {
  const stmt = db.prepare(`select * from jsons where id = ?1`).bind(id)
  const results = await stmt.first()
  return results
}

Overall, using D1 and Pages has been a positive experience, as it currently runs everything for free.