HANDS-ON IMPLEMENTATION OF NEXT.JS STANDALONE BUILD FOR SIGNIFICANT DEPLOYMENT SIZE REDUCTION

Abstract

raditional Next.js application deployment packages often result in extremely large file sizes, reaching over 1.5 GB, which impacts deployment efficiency and application performance. This research implements the Next.js standalone build feature on the LPPM v1 system (Research Proposal Management System) built using Next.js 16, TypeScript, Prisma ORM, and PostgreSQL. Baseline measurements show a traditional deployment size of 1,609.82 MB. After implementing standalone build with output: 'standalone' configuration and outputFileTracingIncludes for Prisma integration, the deployment size reduced to 384.83 MB—a reduction of 76.1% (1,225 MB). Performance testing shows cold start time improvement from 4 seconds to 0.109 seconds (97.3% faster), while deployment upload time decreased from 21 minutes to 5 minutes on a 10 Mbps connection. Comprehensive functionality validation confirms no feature regression across 80+ API endpoints, NextAuth.js authentication system, Prisma database operations, and file uploads. Cost-benefit analysis projects annual savings of $15-25 for storage and 32 hours for deployment time. The results of this research prove that standalone build mode is ready for production environments without sacrificing application functionality.