In this tutorial, you will learn how to connect a headless CMS (ContentFul) with NextJS. I am a lover of good CMS and ContentFul definitely ticks the boxes in terms of cool CMS features. Contentful is a powerful, highly extensible headless Content Management Software (CMS). It is an API-First CMS from where you can create, manage and distribute content to any platform or device. In this video and article, you will learn how to integrate these two.
If you haven’t already, set up an account with Contentful. Small usage account as free. The first step will be to connect ContentFul with NextJS. Connecting ContentFul with NextJS is done using API keys. Within ContentFul you will need to get your API key.
These keys will need to be added to your application. For development purposes, simply create a .env file and add the keys as shown below:
If you are using Netlify, in production, you can add these keys within the Netlify UI:
After you have access to the keys in your application you need some connection magic. Instead of having to reinvent the wheel, ContentFul have provided a good NPM package called 'contentful' that you can install to do the hard work for you. To install the package, you can run this NPM command:
With the package installed, you can establish a connection from the application to the CMS. This is doing using this code snippet:
With the code to create a connection nail using the client(). You are then free to query the CMS. This can be done using this code:
So now we have this code to call the CMS, you are free to call the content in a page. In your NextJS home, you could call and render this code, like this :
Happy Coding 🤘
