Nuxt 3.8

💻 Nuxi improvements

Just to remind you, we're now using the new Nuxt CLI which is now versioned separately. There are some exciting improvements there to follow, so do check out the latest releases. (For example, we now share the same port with the Vite websocket, meaning better support for docker containers in development.)

😴 Nightly release channel

Every commit to the main branch of Nuxt is automatically deployed to a new release, for easier testing before releases. We've renamed this from the 'edge release channel' to the 'nightly release channel' to avoid confusion with edge deployments. And probably also with Microsoft Edge (though I haven't heard that anyone was confused with that one!)

➡️ nuxt3 is now nuxt-nightly ➡️ nuxi-edge is now nuxi-nightly ➡️ @​nuxt/kit-edge is now @​nuxt/kit-nightly

... and so on.

You can read more about how it works.

📂 Deeper layout scanning

🚨 This is a behaviour change so do take care with this one: 🚨

We now support scanning layouts within subfolders in ~/layouts in the same way as we do with ~/components.

See #20190 for more information

⚗️ Nitro v2.7

Nitro v2.7 has been released with lots of improvements and bug fixes - do check out the full changelog.

📊 App Manifest

We now support a built-in app manifest (see #21641), which generates a manifest at /_nuxt/builds/meta/<buildId>.json.

Initially this enables loading payloads only for prerendered routes, if a site is static (preventing 404s). It also enables client-side route rules. To begin with, only redirect route rules will have an effect; they will now redirect when performing client-side navigation. (More coming soon...!)

The app manifest also enables future enhancements including detection of outdated deployments by checking /_nuxt/builds/latest.json.

You can switch off this behaviour if you need to (but do let us know if you have any issues):

export default defineNuxtConfig({  experimental: {    appManifest: false  }})

🤝 Scope and context improvements

We now define a 'scope' for Nuxt composables executed in plugins (#23667), which allows running synchronous cleanup before navigating away from your site, using the Vue onScopeDispose lifecycle method. This should fix an edge case with cookies (#23697) and also improves memory management, for example in Pinia stores (#23650). You can read more about Vue effect scopes.

We also now support native async context for the Vue composition API (#23526). In case you're unaware, we support native async context on Node and Bun, enabled with experimental.asyncContext. This can help address issues with missing a Nuxt instance. But it didn't previously affect missing Vue instances.

If you experience issues with 'Nuxt instance unavailable', enabling this option may solve your issues, and once we have cross-runtime support we are likely to enable it by default.

export default defineNuxtConfig({  experimental: {    asyncContext: true  }})

🚨 Built-in Nuxt DevTools

We've released v1.0.0 of the Nuxt DevTools and we now think it's ready to be shipped as a direct dependency of Nuxt.

👉 You can check out the release notes for more information - and stay tuned for an article detailing our roadmap for the future.

🔗 NuxtLink defaults

We've supported defining your own NuxtLink components with the defineNuxtLink utility. We now support customising the options for the built-in <NuxtLink>, directly in your nuxt.config file (#23724). This can enable you to enforce trailing slash behaviour across your entire site, for example.

export default defineNuxtConfig({  experimental: {    defaults: {      nuxtLink: {        activeClass: 'nuxt-link-active',        trailingSlash: 'append'      }    }  }})

⚡️ Data fetching improvements: deep and caching

We have two very significant new features for useAsyncData and useFetch:

1. You can now set deep: false to prevent deep reactivity on the data object returned from these composables (#23600). It should be a performance improvement if you are returning large arrays or objects. The object will still update when refetched; it just won't trigger reactive effects if you change a property deep within the data.
2. You can now use the getCachedData option to handle custom caching for these composables (#20747)

const nuxtApp = useNuxtApp()const { data } = await useAsyncData(() => { /* fetcher */ }, {  // this will not refetch if the key exists in the payload  getCachedData: key => nuxtApp.payload.static[key] ?? nuxtApp.payload.data[key]})

We also support configuring some default values for these composables in an app-wide way (#23725):

export default defineNuxtConfig({  experimental: {    defaults: {      useAsyncData: {        deep: false      },      useFetch: {        retry: false,        retryDelay: 100,        retryStatusCodes: [500],        timeout: 100      }    }  }})

🔢 Layer ordering improvements

We now more carefully load layer plugins (#22889 and #23148) and middleware (#22925 and #23552) in the order of the layers, always loading your own plugins and middleware last. This should mean you can rely on utilities that layers may inject.

We've also added a test suite to cover these layer resolution changes.

📸 Nuxt Image auto-install

We've now made <NuxtImg> and <NuxtPicture> first-class built-in components, documenting them and auto-installing @nuxt/image the first time that they are used (#23717).

https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt/assets/28706372/597c9307-5741-4d9c-8eab-aad5bfef2ef2

We would definitely advise using @nuxt/image if you're using images in your site; it can apply optimisations to make your site more performant.

💪 Type import changes

🚨 This is likely to need code changes in your project 🚨

Vue requires that type imports be explicit (so that the Vue compiler can correctly optimise and resolve type imports for props and so on). See core Vue tsconfig.json.

We've therefore taken the decision to turn on verbatimModuleSyntax by default in Nuxt projects, which will throw a type error if types are imported without an explicit type import. To resolve it you will need to update your imports:

- import { someFunction, SomeOptions } from 'some-library'+ import { someFunction } from 'some-library'+ import type { SomeOptions } from 'some-library'

You may also encounter modules in the Nuxt ecosystem that need to be updated; please open an issue for those modules. I'm also very happy to help if you're encountering any problems with this, if you're a module author. Just tag me and I'll take a look.

If for whatever reason you need to undo this change in your project you can set the following configuration:

export default defineNuxtConfig({  typescript: {    tsConfig: {      compilerOptions: {        verbatimModuleSyntax: false      }    }  }})

However, we'd recommend only doing that temporarily, as Vue does need this option to be set for best results.