How to proxy to backend with default Next.js dev server?

To proxy to backend with default Next.js dev server, we configure our Next.js config with the URL rewrite.

For instance, in next.config.js, we write

module.exports = {
  async rewrites() {
    return [
      {
        source: "/api/:path*",
        destination: "http://localhost:8000/:path*",
      },
    ];
  },
};

to return an array with an object with the source path and the destination path which we redirect the source path to.

This lets us create a proxy to the back end for our Next.js app