🧠 How to Level Up Your Full-Stack Game with tRPC and Next.js

Full-stack development in 2025 is all about speed, safety, and simplicity. And if you’re tired of writing API schemas, DTOs, and constantly syncing types between your frontend and backend — say hello to tRPC.

In this post, we’ll break down how tRPC + Next.js gives you superpowers for building type-safe, full-stack apps without writing a single line of API boilerplate.

tRPC (short for TypeScript Remote Procedure Call) lets you create fully typesafe APIs without needing a REST or GraphQL layer. Your frontend talks to the backend directly through function calls.

You define your procedures once on the server — and call them from the client as if they were local functions, all with full TypeScript support.

tRPC integrates perfectly with Next.js App Router or Pages Router, and works with React Server Components too.

Here’s the general flow:

1. Define procedures in a router on the server
2. Export the router and set up a tRPC server handler (API route or middleware)
3. Use createTRPCReact() to access procedures from the client

1// server/api/trpc.ts
2import { initTRPC } from '@trpc/server';
3
4const t = initTRPC.create();
5export const appRouter = t.router({
6  hello: t.procedure.query(() => 'Hello from tRPC!'),
7});
8
9export type AppRouter = typeof appRouter;

1// app/api/trpc/[trpc]/route.ts
2import { fetchRequestHandler } from '@trpc/server/adapters/fetch';
3import { appRouter } from '@/server/api/trpc';
4
5export const dynamic = 'force-dynamic';
6
7export async function GET(req: Request) {
8  return fetchRequestHandler({
9    req,
10    endpoint: '/api/trpc',
11    router: appRouter,
12    createContext: () => ({}),
13  });
14}

1// app/page.tsx
2'use client';
3
4import { trpc } from '@/utils/trpc';
5
6export default function HomePage() {
7  const hello = trpc.hello.useQuery();
8
9  return <div>{hello.data ?? 'Loading...'}</div>;
10}

✅ End-to-end type safety

• If your app needs a public API, REST or GraphQL may be better
• If your team isn’t TypeScript-savvy, the learning curve might be steep
• If you’re doing microservices with non-TypeScript services, tRPC won’t help there

tRPC works great with Zod to validate inputs:

1import { z } from 'zod';
2
3const appRouter = t.router({
4  greet: t.procedure
5    .input(z.object({ name: z.string() }))
6    .query(({ input }) => `Hello, ${input.name}`),
7});

tRPC isn’t just a tool — it’s a philosophy: “Don’t repeat yourself. Especially not types.”

With tRPC and Next.js, you’re building APIs by not building APIs — just calling strongly typed procedures, backed by full inference and validation.

• tRPC Official Docs
• tRPC with Next.js App Router Guide
• Zod - TypeScript-first schema validation

Got questions or tips about tRPC?