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Hosh'ki Tsunoda
Hosh'ki Tsunoda

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at hoshki.me

How to use self-hosted fonts in Nextjs

Nextjs is a React framework that gives you pretty much everything you need for production out of the box including hybrid static & server rendering, TypeScript support, smart bundling, route pre-fetching. Super fun tool to play with and I am a big fan now.

The recent project I worked on used Nextjs. It was fairly simple and straightforward, however, I found using self-hosted fonts on Nextjs a bit tricky.

Maybe I didn't do a good job searching but there wasn't much info on how to add fonts in Nextjs. Turned out, it works just like using regular self-hosted fonts ( font-face ) in a traditional way but with some extra steps.

First, you need to create a /fontsfolder inside /publicfolder and add all the fonts you wish to use( .eot, .woff, .woff2, .ttf ). Then, create a CSS file in the same folder as these font files ( /public/fonts/fonts.css ).

Once fonts.css is created, you can import your font(s) in there using @font-facelike so:

// fonts.css
@font-face {
  font-family: 'your-font';
  src: url('your-font.eot');
  src: url('your-font.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
    url('your-font.woff2') format('woff2'),
    url('your-font.woff') format('woff'),
    url('your-font.ttf') format('truetype');
  font-weight: normal;
  font-style: normal;
}
...
...
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In a typical web build, you link this fonts.css file in HTML file using <head> tag, but in Nextjs, you need to add it to _document.js like this:

// _document.js
export default class MyDocument extends Document {
  render() {
    return (
      <Html lang="en">
        <Head>
          <meta name="theme-color" content={theme.palette.primary.main} />
          <link rel="stylesheet" href="/fonts/fonts.css" />
        </Head>
        <body>
          <Main />
          <NextScript />
        </body>
      </Html>
    )
  }
}
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Usually, _document.js file is located under /pages folder.

Once that's done, you are good to go! All you do is just reference the font-family in your CSS.

Opinionated: Be more efficient

To make things more efficient and flexible, I like making constant files for page data and import it as needed. By doing this, you can update/change data without going into each file. Here's an example for font constant file:

// constant/fonts.js
export const MAIN_REGULAR = 'your-font-regular'
export const MAIN_BOLD = 'your-font-bold'
export const SECONDARY_REGULAR = 'your-secondary-font-regular'
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Then in your project ( assume you are using CSS-in-JS, below is an example using Material-UI ), use it like this:

// SomeComponent.js
import { makeStyles } from '@material-ui/core/styles'

import * as Font from '../../../constant/fonts'

const useStyles = makeStyles((theme) => ({
  text: {
    fontFamily: Font.MAIN_REGULAR,
    fontSize: '32px',
  },
  ...
  ...
}))
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That's it! You can do this with all other data like URLs, theme colors etc.

Hope some of you find this helpful:)

Please share if you like what you just read. Thank you!

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