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getInitialProps

Good to know: getInitialProps is a legacy API. We recommend using getStaticProps or getServerSideProps instead.

getInitialProps is an async function that can be added to the default exported React component for the page. It will run on both the server-side and again on the client-side during page transitions. The result of the function will be forwarded to the React component as props.

pages/index.tsx

import { NextPageContext } from 'next'
 
Page.getInitialProps = async (ctx: NextPageContext) => {
  const res = await fetch('https://api.github.com/repos/vercel/next.js')
  const json = await res.json()
  return { stars: json.stargazers_count }
}
 
export default function Page({ stars }: { stars: number }) {
  return stars
}

Good to know:

Data returned from getInitialProps is serialized when server rendering. Ensure the returned object from getInitialProps is a plain Object, and not using Date, Map or Set.

For the initial page load, getInitialProps will run on the server only. getInitialProps will then also run on the client when navigating to a different route with the next/link component or by using next/router.

If getInitialProps is used in a custom _app.js, and the page being navigated to is using getServerSideProps, then getInitialProps will also run on the server.

Context Object

getInitialProps receives a single argument called context, which is an object with the following properties:

Name	Description
`pathname`	Current route, the path of the page in `/pages`
`query`	Query string of the URL, parsed as an object
`asPath`	`String` of the actual path (including the query) shown in the browser
`req`	HTTP request object (server only)
`res`	HTTP response object (server only)
`err`	Error object if any error is encountered during the rendering

Caveats

getInitialProps can only be used in pages/ top level files, and not in nested components. To have nested data fetching at the component level, consider exploring the App Router.
Regardless of whether your route is static or dynamic, any data returned from getInitialProps as props will be able to be examined on the client-side in the initial HTML. This is to allow the page to be hydrated correctly. Make sure that you don't pass any sensitive information that shouldn't be available on the client in props.