On-demand Incremental Static Regeneration (next.js 12.1)

[priard]

Hi, next.js 12.1 introduces On-demand Incremental Static Regeneration.

"Next.js now exposes a function unstable_revalidate () allowing you to revalidate individual pages that use getStaticProps. (...) You can now manually purge the Next.js cache for a specific page on-demand."

This gives the possibility to trigger the revalidate cache of selected paths, e.g. during publishing, saving and updating (WordPress backend) without the need to set revalidation for a specific time. With larger websites this will save a lot of server resources while still maintaining excellent performance.

I wonder if you are considering introducing this possibility in future versions of Faust?

More info on next.js On-demend ISR: https://nextjs.org/blog/next-12-1

[theodesp]

Hello @priard. Thank you for the heads up. We will investigate this feature as part of the larger effort to revalidate content on demand.

Looking at this workflow though, I would be very cautious on having the main WordPress backend trying to trigger anything to the Front-end site URL. With regular WP this is not an issue. But in the Headless worlds there should be only a one way communication (from the Front-end site URL to WP backend and not vice versa) to reduce any coupling scenarios.

However ( I haven't verified though ) this could be done with any plugin/hook that triggers webhooks on post update/create like this one. Here are some rough steps:

1. You would have to configure the plugin to send a webhook request to the Front-end site URL.
2. You would have to create a special api handler as shown in the example to listen to those requests coming from the plugin.
3. Whenever the post is updated it will post to the api handler and revalidate the page.

I hope this helps.