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Introducing nextjs-nestapi

· 2 min read
Rejaul Karim
Author of nextjs-nestapi

Next.js App Router route handlers are fast and simple — and that simplicity starts to hurt once an API grows past a handful of endpoints. Every route is its own file, request parsing is manual, and there's no shared structure for organizing controllers, validating input, or documenting what you've built.

NestJS solves exactly this with controllers, decorators, and DTOs — but pulling in a full Nest runtime (modules, a DI container, its own HTTP adapter) inside a Next.js app is a lot of machinery for what is usually just "organize my API routes."

nextjs-nestapi is the middle ground.

What it looks like​

import {Controller, Get, Post, Body, type RouteContext} from "nextjs-nestapi";
import {CreateHelloDto} from "./dto";

@Controller("/hello")
export class HelloController {
  @Get("/:id")
  getOne(context: RouteContext) {
    return {id: context.params.id};
  }

  @Post("")
  create(@Body(CreateHelloDto) dto: CreateHelloDto) {
    return {created: dto};
  }
}

One catch-all app/api/[[...route]]/route.ts dispatches every request to your registered controllers. @Body(DtoClass) validates the request against a class-validator DTO and returns a structured error response automatically when it fails. No DI container, no modules — just plain classes wired together with createApplication().

Why not just use NestJS's own Next.js adapter, or plain route handlers?​

  • Plain route handlers work fine for a few endpoints, but you end up hand-rolling the same body-parsing, validation, and error-shaping logic in every file.
  • A full NestJS app running inside Next.js gives you all of that back, plus a DI container, modules, guards, pipes, and interceptors you may not need — and a second framework's request lifecycle running alongside Next.js's own.

nextjs-nestapi picks a narrower scope on purpose: routing, DTO validation, and middleware, implemented directly on top of NextRequest/NextResponse. See Limitations for the full list of what's deliberately left out.

Get started​

npx nextjs-nestapi new my-app

or wire it into an existing project:

npm install nextjs-nestapi class-validator class-transformer
npx nextjs-nestapi init

Head to the Quick start to build your first controller.