Live chat, multiplayer collaboration, and notifications are now standard expectations in web apps. Building them usually means standing up and running realtime infrastructure alongside your frontend.
We’ve launched the Ably Next.js Starter Kit on the Vercel Templates Marketplace to shorten that path. Deploy it to Vercel, add your Ably API key, and you have a working realtime app to build on.
What's in the starter kit
The kit demonstrates the four Ably fundamentals that most realtime features rely on:
- Token authentication: securely connect clients to Ably from your Next.js app.
- Pub/Sub: publish and subscribe to messages on channels.
- Presence: see who’s online in a channel or room.
- History: retrieve messages published before a client connected.
Build on these to add live chat, multiplayer collaboration, data sync, data broadcast, or notifications. It’s a starting point, so you decide which patterns fit your app and how far to take them.
Why Next.js and Ably fit together
Next.js is a React-based JavaScript framework created by Vercel. Frontend developers use it to build fast, user-friendly web applications.
Ably adds the realtime layer. We provide the infrastructure and APIs for shared, collaborative experiences, and developers at thousands of companies use the platform to add realtime features to their apps. You don’t provision or manage that infrastructure yourself.
Get started
- Create a free Ably account and copy your API key.
- Deploy the Next.js Starter Kit from Vercel and add your key as
ABLY_API_KEY. - Explore the live demo or the source on GitHub.
Want a guided build? Follow our step-by-step tutorial to build a realtime chat app with Ably and Next.js.
Also new: Netlify and Terraform
The starter kit is part of a wider effort to make Ably easier to adopt in the tools you already use. Two recent additions:
- Ably is now on the Netlify Integrations Hub, so Netlify developers can add realtime functionality to their web apps.
- The Ably Terraform Provider lets you manage your Ably infrastructure as code.
Deploy the starter kit on Vercel → or try Ably for free and start building realtime apps with the framework you already use.
