Next Right Now is a production-ready boilerplate for Next.js.

Authored by Unly less than a year ago, it has recently reached 500 GitHub stars, with more than 1000 unique visitors in December 2020 alone!

Our main motivation by releasing our internal framework as open-source software, was to share it with the community, hoping the quality would increase.

And it did! In 2O2O, Next Right Now was visited by people from 139 different countries, for a total of ~6k unique visitors!

Open-source takes time, it really does. But it's part of our core at Unly, our goal is to help students access higher education, and open-source is naturally on the way!

2020 statistics

Unsurprisingly, most visitors were from the United States.
What was more surprising through, is that India is ranked 2nd!
And France is 3rd, that was also a great surprise considering we're a French company ourselves!

Chrome was used by 80% of the developers reading the NRN documentation, Safari comes second (10%), then Firefox (6%) and Edge (3%). Nothing astounding here.

Bounce rate was around 50%, which isn't bad. There were more than 35k page views in total, with an average session duration of 2:36mn.

Those statistics are interesting and show us developers come back and spend even more time on the documentation, which is a great sign for conversion. That means people like what they see, and they come back for more.

And more, we've got!

2020 features

There have been some incredible features implemented in 2020, thanks to the community:

• Trigger a GitHub Action workflow remotely (workflow dispatch), we've used this to trigger Vercel deployments from our Stacker app and from GitHub Actions UI itself!
• A Vercel deployment webhook was added in December 2020, making it possible to get notified when a Vercel deployment is completed. We've used this to update our Airtable dataset automatically, works very great!
• We've released our first GitHub Action less than 2 weeks ago (awaits for a Vercel deployment to be completed) and we're already working on a new one! (share GitHub Action variables between jobs) and it's being beta-tested at the moment!
• We've recently updated the Next Right Now documentation, and explained in-depth all our built-in scripts and built-in utilities, among many other things.
• Automated versioning, using the Git commit history.
• Automated releasing, using GitHub Actions! (we've added quite a lot of automations this last month alone!)
• Auto-aliasing of Vercel custom domains, for production but also preview! (which is a paid feature on Vercel, and quite an expensive one, too)

What about 2021?

We have many things planned for 2021, and we're very excited by the recent Vercel/Next.js announcements. 2021 looks promising already!

Also, we're gonna start a new big open-source project! It might just become the most flexible Chatbot out there ;)