This Next.js plugin let you use something like Next.js Server Actions with the /pages directory, letting you call server functions directly from your client components.

WIth Server Actions i mean calling your functions that run in the server directly in your client components, it does not closely follow the Next.js Server Actions behavior.

Differences with Next.js Server Actions

• Actions can be imported inside pages and app files

• Actions must be defined in

  • a file inside the /pages/api directory with the "poor man's use server" directive on top
  • a route inside the /app directory with the "poor man's use server" directive on top

• No closure support, actions can be defined for an entire file(adding "poor man's use server" at the top of the file)

• Actions can run concurrently

• Actions can throw errors, on the client these errors will be thrown with the same error message

• Actions inputs and outputs are serialized with superjson, a superset of JSON

• Actions do not work inside formAction, you call the function inside onSubmit instead

• To get headers and cookies you cannot import them directly from next/headers, instead you have to use getContext:

  "poor man's use server";
  import { cookies, headers } from 'server-actions-for-next-pages/headers';
  
  export async function action({}) {
    return { headers: headers(), cookies: cookies() };
  }

Installation

npm i server-actions-for-next-pages

Usage

Add the plugin to your next.config.js file:

// next.config.js
const { withServerActions } = require('server-actions-for-next-pages');

/** @type {import('next').NextConfig} */
const nextConfig = withServerActions()({
  reactStrictMode: false,
});

module.exports = nextConfig;

Create a file for your server actions inside the /pages/api directory with "poor man's use server" at the top:

// pages/api/server-actions.js
"poor man's use server";

export async function serverAction() {
  return { hello: 'world' };
}

Import your actions in your client components:

// pages/index.jsx
import { serverAction } from './api/server-actions';

export default function Page() {
  serverAction().then((data) => console.log(data));

  return <div>...</div>;
}

Usage in edge runtime

This plugin assumes the runtime of your app to be Nodejs unless you explicitly set it to edge for your api page, this means that to support the edge runtime you need to export a config object like export const config = { runtime: 'edge' }; in your api page.

// pages/api/server-actions.js
"poor man's use server";

export const runtime = 'edge';

export async function serverAction() {
  return { hello: 'world' };
}

Accessing the request and response objects

This plugin injects the req and res objects in an AsyncLocalStorage context, so you can access them in your server functions:

Edge function example:

"poor man's use server";

import { cookies, headers } from 'server-actions-for-next-pages/headers';

export const runtime = 'edge';

export async function serverAction({}) {
  const host = headers().get('host');
  return { host };
}

Example in Node.js:

"poor man's use server";
import { cookies, headers } from 'server-actions-for-next-pages/headers';

export async function createUser({ name = '' }) {

  const host = headers().get('host');

  return {
    name,
    host,
  };
}

Adding error logging and handling

You can export a function named wrapMethod to easily wrap all your server actions with error logging or other wrappers

"poor man's use server";

export function wrapMethod(fn) {
  return async (...args) => {
    try {
      const res = await fn(...args);
      return res;
    } catch (error) {
      console.error(error);
      throw error;
    }
  };
}

export async function failingFunction({}) {
  throw new Error('This function fails');
}

How it works

The plugin will replace the content of files inside pages/api with "poor man's use server" at the top to make the exported functions callable from the browser.

When processing the file for the server the plugin creates an API handler that follows the JSON RPC spec.

When processing the file for the client the plugin replaces the exported functions with a fetch calls to the API handler.

This plugin uses Babel to process your page content, it will not slow down compilation time noticeably because it only process files inside the pages/api folder.

Credits

This is a fork of the awesome next-rpc with some changes:

• It supports the Edge runtime
• Uses superjson to serialize and deserialize arguments and results
• It sets status code to 502 when the server function throws an error
• It uses the top level "poor man's use server" instead of the config.rpc option
• wrapMethod can be defined with an export instead of config.wrapMethod