Guide to Using App Router in Next.js

If you are one of the web developers who are newly working with Next.js, one of the first questions that may come to your mind is how you can use the app router in this framework. Next.js provides extensive tools for managing routes at your disposal, and one of its most attractive recent features is the App Router. This capability allows you to manage routing more effectively and better than the previous routes, helping you create better applications.

You might find it interesting how the App Router works. Well, this section of Next.js provides you with advanced capabilities like nested routes and dynamic routes and allows you to simply create routes for your own applications. In this way, you can pass different parameters to the URL and based on those, display different content to the users.

If you are interested in customization and changing Next.js routing behavior, using the next.config.js file is one of the most straightforward options available. In this file, you can customize various defaults related to routing and even change the entire route structure. For example, you can use the experimental feature named turbo, which helps enhance the routing behavior given to you.

One of the advantages of this approach is that you can easily add new routes to the next.config.js file without needing extensive changes, thereby promoting your application architecture. Even if this feature is still in the experimental phase, you can utilize it in your own applications and speed up its performance.

Code Example Using App Router

// next.config.js example of usage 
module.exports = {
  experimental: {
    turbo:
    {
      enable: true,
      monitoring: 'advanced',
    },
  },
}

Line-by-Line Explanation

module.exports = { <-- This line allows the configuration modules of Next.js
experimental: { <-- This line utilizes the experimental settings
turbo: <-- Here we enable the Turbo feature that helps in application routing
enable: true, <-- This line allows us to activate Turbo
monitoring: 'advanced', <-- This line sets the type of monitoring on the advanced configuration