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Next.js is infuriating

(blog.meca.sh)
1033 points Bogdanp | 1 comments | 02 Sep 25 06:57 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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Rauchg ◴[02 Sep 25 08:31 UTC] No.45100460[source]▶
Heard and appreciate the feedback. We’re well aware of the DX papercuts in Middleware. With 15.5 we made a big step in supporting Node runtime[1] which addresses a slew of issues people have reported over time.

If I went back in time, I would have called it Routing Middleware or Routing Handler. A specific hook to intercept during the routing phase, which can be delivered to the CDN edge for specialized providers. It’s also a somewhat advanced escape hatch.

Since OP mentions logging, it’s worth noting that for instrumentation and observability we’ve embraced OpenTelemetry and have an instrumentation.ts convention[2]

[1] https://nextjs.org/blog/next-15-5#nodejs-middleware-stable

[2] https://nextjs.org/docs/app/api-reference/file-conventions/i...

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1. dminik ◴[02 Sep 25 15:10 UTC] No.45104120[source]▶
Yeah, I was actually recommended the instrumentation route by a commenter on Reddit.

I spent a similar amount of time setting up opentelemetry with Next and while it would have been titled differently, I would have likely still written a blog post after this experience too.

This isn't your fault, but basically every opentelemetry package I had to setup is marked as experimental. This does not build confidence when pushing stuff to production.

Then, for the longest time I couldn't get the pino instrumentation working. I managed to figure it out eventually, but it was a pain.

First, pino has to be added to serverExternalPackages. If it's not, the OTel instrumentation does not work.

Second, the automatic instrumentation is extremely allergic to import order. And also for whatever reason, only the pino default export is instrumented. Again, this took a while to figure out.

Module local variables don't work how I would expect. I had to use globalThis instead.

And after all that I was still hit by this: https://github.com/vercel/next.js/issues/80445

It does work, but it was not great to set up. Granted, I went with the manual router (eg. not using vercel/otel).