vitepress VS Next.js

There is a discussion related to naming on GitHub: https://github.com/vuejs/vitepress/discussions/548

> I initially gave VitePress a different name because I wanted to be able to explore a different architecture without worrying about backwards compat. After shipping the vuejs.org with VitePress, I believe VitePress is flexible enough to be a full replacement of current VuePress while offering better DX and better performance.

Given that version 1 landed as "VitePress" they probably decided to keep the name.

> ...

> I think we should ship VitePress stable as VuePress 3, but I am open to potential questions and concerns.

> Pros: Less confusion in the long run. There will be just one officially maintained SSG with better DX, better performance, and customization that fully aligns with standard Vite-based Vue apps.

> Cons: Potential confusion in the short run, since there are probably a lot of tutorials / integrations targeting VuePress 1. Still I think with the recent Vue 3 switch, users won't be surprised with a major upgrade for VuePress.

I was inspired by a great series of blog posts and decided to adapt the approach to my needs. In this blog post, I will go over the solution I used in my VitePress site but you can also check a more basic example in this CodePen.

While researching which static site generator we would use, we had a lot of frameworks to pick up from, but only some addressed our needs. While choosing, we needed it to have a good "default" template, out-of-the-box plugins, and be easy to extend its functionalities. From our research, the one that matched most criteria and felt the easiest to start and progress with was Vitepress.

They are using the default theme of VitePress which is a great tool for building content-centric websites such as documentation

Thankfully, an entire ecosystem of frameworks makes docs sites easy to build and services that make static sites easy to deploy. In this post, you'll learn how to build a docs site with VitePress and deploy it to the internet with Render.

I have a few Jekyll blogs including my personal one and I haven't had to touch the Jekyll part for quite a while (it takes a while to compile). I just write in Obsidian and then Github takes over.

I also maintain two VitePress[1] sites. Once I setup it up (I still use Sublime Text), I do the writing on Obsidian.

What I write and see in Obsidian is good enough that I have just done away with looking at how the site looks after I change/add/edit the text. I sometimes do but just to check build and if the sitemaps are generated, etc. -- routine hygiene.

1. https://vitepress.dev

Consider Nuxt instead of Vuepress/Vitepress. If you want the built-in theme in Vitepress, it's great, but if you want to make your own, using Nuxt with the Content plugin is probably better. I found the strong separation between theme and content to be too great, and if I have a docs SSG site using Vitepress and a webapp SSR site using Nuxt, I can't share themes easily anyway.

At least that was my conclusion starting with Vitepress, and ending up with Nuxt 3.

https://nuxt.com/

https://vitepress.dev/ (they haven't decided if they are going to replace Vuepress or not: https://github.com/vuejs/vitepress/discussions/548)

Another option vitepress

Next.js has long cemented itself as one of the front runners in the web framework world for JavaScript/TypeScript projects so we’re going to be using that. More specifically we’re going to be using V14 of Next.js which allows us to use some exciting new features like Server Actions and the App Router.

Web frameworks like Next.js will usually include this feature, but do check that they set the caching headers correctly!

Vite and Next.js are both top 5 modern development framework right now. They are both great depending on your use case so we’ll discuss 4 areas: Architecture, main features, developer experience and production readiness. After learning about these we’ll have a better idea of which one is best for your project.

> It’s important to be aware of what you are getting if you go with React, and what you are getting is a far cry from what a framework would offer, with all the corresponding pros and cons.

Would you like to elaborate on that?

In my experience, with something as great, size/ecosystem-wise as React, there will almost always be at least one "mainstream" package for whatever you might want to do with it, that integrates pretty well. Where a lot of things might come out of the box with a framework, with a library I often find myself just needing to install the "right" package, and from there it's pretty much the same.

For example, using https://angular.io/guide/i18n-overview or installing and using https://react.i18next.com/

Or something like https://angular.io/guide/form-validation out of the box, vs installing and using https://formik.org/

Or perhaps https://angular.io/guide/router vs https://reactrouter.com/en/main

Even adding something that's not there out of the box is pretty much the same, like https://primeng.org/ or https://primereact.org/

React will typically have more fragmentation and therefore also choice, but I don't see those two experiences as that different. Updates and version management/supply chain will inevitably be more of a mess with the library, admittedly.

Now, projects like Next https://nextjs.org/ exist and add what some might regard as the missing pieces and work well if you want something opinionated and with lots of features out of the box, but a lot of those features (like SSR) are actually pretty advanced and not always even necessary.

Next.js: For the website and the admin dashboard

Until the time of writing, there is no official example of how to enable runtime environmental variables in a Dockerized Next.js app, as utilizing unstable_noStore would only dynamically evaluate variables on the server (node.js runtime). There is also an interesting discussion regarding this topic on GitHub.

next.js is a very popular React framework. remix-adonisjs includes more functionality through the AdonisJS backend ecosystem, and should be easier to self-host and self-manage.

Cheryl Murphy is not only a dedicated full-stack web developer skilled in technologies like React, Next.js, and NestJs but also a community-driven professional who recently took on the role of volunteer project team lead at Web Dev Path. With a dual Bachelor's degree in Computing and Chemical Engineering from Monash University, Cheryl’s journey in tech is marked by a passion for building accessible solutions and a commitment to fostering community within tech.

For more information, check out this issue.

Remember to start the Next.js server with pnpm dev.