Next.js Notion Starter Kit

The perfect starter kit for building websites with Next.js and Notion.

Features

• Setup only takes a few minutes (single config file) 💪
• Robust support for Notion content via react-notion-x
• Next.js / TS / React / Notion
• Excellent page speeds
• Smooth image previews
• Automatic pretty URLs
• Automatic table of contents
• Full support for dark mode
• Quick search via CMD+K / CMD+P
• Responsive for different devices
• Optimized for Next.js and Vercel

Demos

• Default demo - Deployed from the main branch

Setup

All config is defined in site.config.js.

This project requires a recent version of Node.js (>= 14.17).

1. Fork / clone this repo
2. Change a few values in site.config.js
3. npm install
4. npm run dev to test locally
5. npm run deploy to deploy to vercel 💪

I tried to make configuration as easy as possible.

All you really need to do to get started is edit rootNotionPageId. It defaults to rendering my site’s public notion page 78fc5a4b88d74b0e824e29407e9f1ec1.

You’ll want to make your root Notion page public and then copy the link to your clipboard. Then extract the last part of the URL that looks like d1b5dcf8b9ff425b8aef5ce6f0730202, which is your page’s Notion iD.

In order to find your Notion workspace ID (optional), just load any of your site’s pages into your browser and open up the developer console. There will be a global variable that you can access called block which is the Notion data for the current page. If you enter block.space_id, it will print out your page’s workspace ID.

I recommend setting up a collection on your home page (optional; I use an inline gallery here) that contains all of your articles / projects / content. There are no structural constraints on your Notion workspace, however, so feel free to add content as you would normally in Notion.

Production setup

When deploying to Vercel, you’ll need to set up a few things.

Vercel environment variables

Vercel is not aware of the environment variables defined in the .env file.

Therefore, those variable must be defined in Vercel, too. Once defined, they’ll be available on the next builds. See their documentation for more details.

URL Paths

The app defaults to slightly different URL paths in dev vs prod (though pasting any dev pathname into prod will work and vice-versa).

In development, it will use /nextjs-notion-blog-d1b5dcf8b9ff425b8aef5ce6f0730202 which is a slugified version of the page’s title suffixed with its Notion ID. I’ve found that it’s really useful to always have the Notion Page ID front and center during local development.

In production, it will use /nextjs-notion-blog which is a bit nicer as it gets rid of the extra ID clutter.

The mapping of Notion ID to slugified page titles is done automatically as part of the build process. Just keep in mind that if you plan on changing page titles over time, you probably want to make sure old links will still work, and we don’t currently provide a solution for detecting old links aside from Next.js’s built-in support for redirects.

See mapPageUrl and getCanonicalPageId for more details.

NOTE: if you have multiple pages in your workspace with the same slugified name, the app will throw an error letting you know that there are duplicate URL pathnames.

Preview Images

We use next/image to serve images efficiently, with preview images optionally generated via lqip-modern. This gives us extremely optimized image support for sexy smooth images.

Preview images are enabled by default, but they can be slow to generate, so if you want to disable them, set isPreviewImageSupportEnabled to false in site.config.js.

If you want to cache generated preview images to speed up subsequent builds, you’ll need to first set up an external Redis data store. To enable redis caching, set isRedisEnabled to true in site.config.js and then set REDIS_HOST and REDIS_PASSWORD environment variables to point to your redis instance.

You can do this locally by adding a .env file:

REDIS_HOST='TODO'
REDIS_PASSWORD='TODO'

Note that preview images and redis caching are both optional features. If you’d rather not deal with them, just disable them in your site config.

Configuring GitHub Actions

By default, the workflow “Build” runs when commits are pushed to the repository.

If you have defined a Redis instance, you will need to slightly change the configuration, for GitHub Actions to be aware of those environment variables. Here is an example

Additionally, you’ll need to configure the GitHub secrets for REDIS_HOST and REDIS_PASSWORD.

Redis provider

If you want to use redis caching, you can use Redis Labs, which provides a free plan.

Styles

All CSS styles that customize Notion content are located in styles/notion.css. They mainly target global CSS classes exported by react-notion-x styles.css.

Every notion block gets its own unique classname, so you can target individual blocks like this:

.notion-block-260baa77f1e1428b97fb14ac99c7c385 {
  display: none;
}

Dark Mode

Dark mode is fully supported and can be toggled via the sun / moon icon in the footer.

Automatic Table of Contents

By default, every article page will have a table of contents displayed as an aside on desktop. It uses scrollspy logic to automatically update the current section as the user scrolls through your document, and makes it really easy to jump between different sections.

If a page has less than minTableOfContentsItems (default 3), the table of contents will be hidden. It is also hidden on the index page and if the browser window is too small.

This table of contents uses the same logic that Notion uses for its built-in Table of Contents block (see getPageTableOfContents for the underlying logic).

Responsive

All pages are designed to be responsive across common device sizes.

Fathom Analytics

Fathom provides a lightweight alternative to Google Analytics.

To enable analytics, just add a NEXT_PUBLIC_FATHOM_ID environment variable, which will only be used in production.

Note that this feature is completely optional.

PostHog Analytics

PostHog provides a lightweight and open source alternative to Google Analytics.

To enable analytics, just add a NEXT_PUBLIC_POSTHOG_ID environment variable, which will only be used in production.

Note that this feature is completely optional.