By default, Next.js does not come with any linting solution. ESLint is commonly used for linting modern web applications, and is a good companion to Next.js.

Install ESLint Dependencies

First, we need to install these ESLint dependencies:

npm install --save-dev eslint eslint-plugin-react

# or

yarn add --dev eslint eslint-plugin-react

eslint is the CLI and main package responsible for linting your project.

eslint-plugin-react is a plugin for ESLint with rules specific to React.

Generate ESLint Config

ESLint requires a config in the root of the project, which can be easily generated with the CLI.

npx eslint --init

# or

yarn run eslint --init

This command will prompt you for a series of questions:

Select To check syntax and find problems
Select JavaScript modules as the type of module your project uses
Select React as the type of framework your project uses
Select whether your project uses TypeScript. Note: if you do not already have TypeScript configured then your linter will fail. However, you can easily set this up later with this guide: [[eslint-typescript]].
Select Browser as the environment where your code will run in
Select what format you want the ESLint config to be in. I personally prefer JSON.
If prompted to install dependencies, click Yes

You should now have an .eslintrc.* file generated at the root of your project.

ESLint can now be used with the following commands:

npx eslint pages/*

# or

yarn run pages/*

The commands above will only lint the files inside pages/, but you can customize this however you see fit. You can also specify multiple directories: pages/* components/*

For more information on using the CLI, visit the official documentation.

Update ESLint Config for Next.js

If you run ESLint as-is then you'll likely have some linting errors. To fix this, we need to update the ESLint config rules to fit Next.js.

The first thing we need to fix is the warning: Warning: React version not specified in eslint-plugin-react settings

To get rid of this, we can add settings property at the root of our config:

{
    "settings": {
        "react": {
            "version": "detect"
        }
    },
    "env": {
        "browser": true,
        "es2021": true
    },
    "extends": [
        "eslint:recommended",
        "plugin:react/recommended"
    ],
    "parserOptions": {
        "ecmaFeatures": {
            "jsx": true
        },
        "ecmaVersion": 12,
        "sourceType": "module"
    },
    "plugins": [
        "react"
    ],
    "rules": {
    }
}

Open the ESLint config that was generated and edit the rules object:

{
    "settings": {
        "react": {
            "version": "detect"
        }
    },
    "env": {
        "browser": true,
        "es2021": true
    },
    "extends": [
        "eslint:recommended",
        "plugin:react/recommended"
    ],
    "parserOptions": {
        "ecmaFeatures": {
            "jsx": true
        },
        "ecmaVersion": 12,
        "sourceType": "module"
    },
    "plugins": [
        "react"
    ],
    "rules": {
        "react/prop-types": "off",
        "react/react-in-jsx-scope": "off"
    }
}

The react/prop-types rule enforces that all components have prop-types defined. While we can use prop-types with Next.js, TypeScript is typically preferred.

The react/react-in-jsx-scope rule will throw an error if a component files not import React. With React 17, which Next.js now ships with, it is no longer necessary to import React and thus this rule can be disabled.

Finally, we need to update the env property to include node since Next.js supports Server Side Rendering in Node.

{
    "settings": {
        "react": {
            "version": "detect"
        }
    },
    "env": {
        "browser": true,
        "es2021": true,
        "node": true
    },
    "extends": [
        "eslint:recommended",
        "plugin:react/recommended"
    ],
    "parserOptions": {
        "ecmaFeatures": {
            "jsx": true
        },
        "ecmaVersion": 12,
        "sourceType": "module"
    },
    "plugins": [
        "react"
    ],
    "rules": {
        "react/prop-types": "off",
        "react/react-in-jsx-scope": "off"
    }
}

Ignore Unnecessary Files

Now that we have ESLint working properly with Next.js, we need to add a file to tell ESLint to ignore certain files that we do not want linted.

Create a file called .eslintignore at the root of your project with these contents:

**/node_modules/*
**/out/*
**/.next/*

Add Lint Script to package.json

The scripts property in your package.json can be updated to add a lint script to make linting easier:

{
  "name": "my-site",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "private": true,
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "next dev",
    "build": "next build",
    "start": "next start",
    "lint": "eslint ./ --ext js,jsx,ts,tsx"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "next": "10.0.5",
    "react": "17.0.1",
    "react-dom": "17.0.1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "eslint": "^7.18.0",
    "eslint-plugin-react": "^7.22.0"
  }
}

In this lint script we are calling the ESLint CLI, telling it to lint files under the current folder (./), and looking for files with the extensions js, jsx, ts, or tsx.

References

ESLint Getting started Start a clean Next.js project with TypeScript, ESLint and Prettier from scratch

Learn how to manually configure ESLint for Next.js.

Configure an Nx workspace with a React application to use the popular Tailwind CSS framework.

An introduction to my new site!

Using VSCode extensions and pre-commit hooks to automate code formatting with Prettier