I love Nextjs and I love Django, setting them up together takes the fun out of being dev. So, although I do think it is good to know how to set them up manually for experience, you should try nextjango.

nextjango.org

or just type “npx nextjango init” into the CLI and it does everything for you, as long as you have a package manager (npm pnpm yarn bun) and have Python installed on your machine, after running the command you only have to enter npm run dev (or your-package-manager run dev) and it starts both servers and does a server health check and displays the status on the Nextjs frontend homepage. It’s fast, and easy. Not much documentation yet as it’s very new, but it does work good and has extensive unit testing that has been done to ensure the integrity, you can check it out the GitHub too