Pro•Web Development

PDF Tools

Build a full-stack, production-ready PDF Tools web application using Next.js App Router and Django REST Framework. Features a dark-themed dashboard with an iLovePDF-style toolset — merge, split, compress, convert, crop, and more — with real file processing on the backend, optimized for deployment on Render's free tier.

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What You Will Build

A production-grade PDF processing platform inspired by iLovePDF. Users can upload PDFs and images, run server-side operations like merging, splitting, compressing, converting, cropping, and extracting pages — all processed in-memory on a stateless Django backend. The frontend features a sleek dark-themed UI with per-tool pages, drag-and-drop file uploads, real-time feedback, and downloadable results.

Concepts You'll Learn

Next.js App Router with file-based routing and per-tool page layouts
Building a stateless Django REST API with file processing in memory and temp directories
Handling multipart file uploads between a Next.js frontend and Django backend
PDF manipulation with PyMuPDF — merge, split, compress, crop, convert, and extract
Configuring Django for production with Gunicorn and WhiteNoise for static files
Enforcing file size and page count limits for free-tier deployment on Render
Modular backend architecture with per-tool Django views and URL namespacing
TypeScript interfaces and type-safe API response handling on the frontend
Building reusable tool-page components with drag-and-drop upload UX
Cross-origin request handling with CORS in a decoupled full-stack setup
Deploying a full-stack app (Next.js + Django) to Render with environment-based config
Graceful degradation — marking resource-heavy features as 'Coming Soon' on constrained hosting