Course description

This course is a pragmatic, beginner-friendly walkthrough that teaches you to build, run, and deploy a TypeScript Next.js chatbot backed by an OpenAI-compatible API using the App Router. It focuses on a small but real chat application implemented with Next.js (App Router) and TypeScript, connected to an OpenAI-compatible API via the openai npm client.

You will build a chat UI that includes a message list and input box, a secure server API route that forwards messages to the AI API, handling of API errors, and simple local chat history persisted to the browser. An optional lesson covers streaming responses so the UI can show incremental text while the model is generating.

By the end you will be able to start a Next.js + TypeScript project configured with the official packages used in production, implement a client-side chat component and a server API route at /app/api/chat or /api/chat that calls an OpenAI-compatible API, and type the code with TypeScript to get safer API usage and clearer errors. The course shows how to persist conversations to localStorage and explains how to adapt the server to persist to a database. It also covers deploying the finished app to Vercel or a similar host while keeping your API key secret.

Technical lessons include project setup and TypeScript basics (Create a Next.js + TypeScript app, install [email protected] and dotenv, add .env.local with OPENAI_API_KEY, check tsconfig.json, and run npm run dev), App Router anatomy and a minimal chat UI (add /app/layout.tsx and /app/page.tsx, create app/components/ChatWindow.tsx with "use client"), and a secure server route at /app/api/chat/route.ts that uses the openai client to call the Responses API. The course emphasizes server-vs-client boundaries (do not import openai in client code) and basic production notes such as avoiding logging secrets, pinning a Node version, and adding basic rate limits and cost monitoring.

This course is aimed at beginner web developers who know basic HTML/CSS and some JavaScript, are comfortable creating and editing files, and can follow terminal commands (npm, git). The final project is a deployed Next.js TypeScript chatbot that accepts user messages, forwards them to an OpenAI-compatible API from a secure server route, renders AI responses in a chat UI, supports local chat history, and includes TypeScript types and basic production readiness guidance, with optional streaming output.

What will i learn?

• Create a new Next.js project with TypeScript and run it locally (npm run dev).
• Write a client-side chat UI using React components under the App Router.
• Implement a server-side API route that calls an OpenAI-compatible API using the openai npm client ([email protected]).
• Send user messages to the server route, receive model responses, and render them in the UI.
• Use TypeScript types to model request and response shapes for safer code and clearer errors.
• Handle basic errors and show user-friendly messages when the AI API fails or the network drops.
• (Optional) Implement streaming responses so message text appears progressively.
• Persist chat history to localStorage and understand how to swap that for a simple server DB later.
• Deploy the app to Vercel (or another host) while keeping API keys secret.