Specify namespacesRequired without getInitialProps

Specifying namespacesRequired is optional, but recommended for performance reasons. Currently, the only way to set namespacesRequired is from getInitialProps.

There are several pages in my projects that only have a getInitialProps to specify namespacesRequired, and using getInitialProps prevents next.js from performing automatic static optimization and pre-rendering HTML.

This makes it unclear which has better performance:

• setting namespacesRequired, only sending the fewest translations required to the page, but sacrificing static optimization
• Not setting namespacesRequired, sending all the translations to the page but letting next.js perform static optimization and prerender the HTML.

I think it’s worth considering exposing namespacesRequired with static properties on the page. hoist-non-react-statics may be helpful in this instance.

[isaachinman]

This package will eventually be converted into a NextJs plugin once that functionality lands.

In the meantime, we could migrate this to a static, or something similar.

[ckeeney]

I didn’t realize appWithTranslation adds a getInitialProps to _app.js anyways.

next-i18next needs to do a lot of processing on the request object here so I don’t know if it is possible to do all this without getInitialProps, but maybe with the userRouter hook or the withRouter hoc.

Eliminating getInitialProps is a much bigger undertaking than I thought when I opened this issue and I am probably not going to contribute a PR for this feature in the near future.

Feel free to close this issue if you like, it really isn’t critical but there are performance compromises made when getInitialProps is used and it may be worth leaving the issue open for discussion.