Building Chakra UI Next JS Applications with Ease

Building Chakra UI Next JS applications with ease is a dream come true for many developers. Chakra UI provides a set of pre-designed UI components that can be easily integrated into Next JS applications.

With Chakra UI, you can create visually appealing and responsive UI components in no time. Chakra UI's extensive library of components includes buttons, forms, navigation, and more.

By leveraging Chakra UI's components, you can save a significant amount of time and effort that would be spent on designing and building UI components from scratch. This allows you to focus on the core logic of your application.

Chakra UI's integration with Next JS is seamless, making it easy to create dynamic and data-driven UI components.

We're going to set up Chakra UI and NextJS. This is the foundation of our project.

Chakra UI is a popular React library for building beautiful UI components. It's known for its simplicity and ease of use.

NextJS is a powerful framework for building server-side rendered and statically generated React applications. It's perfect for complex projects.

In this section, we'll cover the basic setup of Chakra UI and NextJS.

To set up a new project, you can use the `npm create @this-dot/starter -- --kit next12-chakra-ui` command. This will create a new Next.js project with Chakra UI already installed.

You'll then need to navigate into your project directory and run `npm install` or `yarn install` to install the dependencies.

To start the development server, run `npm run dev` or `yarn run dev`. This will allow you to see the included example code running in your browser at `http://localhost:3000`.

The project setup also includes the option to have a `src/` directory, which you can choose to include if you want. You'll also be asked if you want to use AppRouter, which is required for page routing.

Here's a quick rundown of the project setup options:

Let's talk about components in Chakra UI Next JS. A component is essentially a reusable piece of code that represents a UI element, like a button or a card. You can create your own components from scratch or use existing ones from Chakra UI.

To create components, you can start by creating a new folder called "components" and then create a "TopBar" folder within it. You can then create a new file called "index.js" and populate it with the necessary code to create a simple top bar for your application. You can also use Chakra-UI to create a button that allows users to toggle between light and dark mode.

You can also create a hero component to display a hero image or a hero text. To do this, create a new file called "Hero.js" and add the necessary code to create the hero component. Once you've created your hero component, you can import it into your "pages/index.js" file to display it on your page.

Creating a hero component is a great way to learn how Chakra works. Chakra is a UI library that helps you build beautiful and consistent user interfaces.

First, create a file called `./components/Hero.js`. This file will hold the code for your hero component. You can put the code in this file:

You've created your hero component, now you need to import it into your main file. Import `Hero.jsx` into your `./pages/index.js` file like so:

In a Chakra-UI application, the Header component is divided into two parts: Nav and Hero components.

To create these components, you'll need to run a code in your terminal. The HStack component allows you to display child elements side by side, and the spacing prop adds uniform spacing between them.

The Nav component likely contains a top bar for the application, which can be created by creating a new folder called "components" and within that a "TopBar" folder.

Chakra UI offers a variety of components that make building web applications a breeze. The Box component is essentially the same as the HTML div element, allowing you to set background color, size, width, padding, margin, and more.

Flex is another commonly used component that behaves like a div with its display set to flex, accepting all CSS flex attributes as props. This makes it a great option for layouts that require flexibility.

The Spacer component is a child element of Flex, determining how spaced out the flex items should be. I've found it helpful for creating clean and organized layouts.

Icons can be easily added to your web application using the Icon component, which accepts the icon as a prop and attributes like box size, color, height, and width.

In Next.js 13, you have the option to decide which component should render on the server-side and client-side. For Chakra UI to work, the provider has to be a client-side rendering component, so you need to add the `client` directive at the top of the file.

The Chakra UI provider is simply another component that acts as a wrapper around children components. It's a .tsx file, which means it's a type of file used for TypeScript.

To ensure that all styles created by Emotion, the CSS-in-JS library used by Chakra UI, are properly included in the HTML, you need to add the `CacheProvider` to the provider file.

Here are some key things to note about the Chakra UI provider:

You can create the Chakra UI provider in a new directory called `provider` under the `/src` directory, and add the necessary code to the `chakra-ui.provider.tsx` file.