CodeVetter · Repo Unpack · Feature catalog
nuxt/nuxt
The developer-facing surface centers on convention-based Vue applications, generated routing, SSR-friendly data access, and deployment choices. The inspected implementation also supports metadata management, component discovery, plugin execution, navigation prefetching, cookie sessions, and route-specific rendering behavior. Development tooling includes filesystem-driven regeneration and optional DevTools integration. This catalog covers the evidenced feature families and explicit experimental limits, rather than claiming an exhaustive inventory of every composable or external CLI command.
- Filesystem routing scans page directories across layers, builds a route tree, resolves metadata, and emits routes.mjs through normalizeRoutes.
- Navigation middleware combines global middleware, matched-page metadata, and routeRules.appMiddleware; named middleware loads on demand and may continue, cancel, redirect, or return an error.
- SSR, client-only shells, prerender payload extraction, cached-route payload extraction, noScripts, and streaming are selected through build flags and route rules in renderRoute.
- useFetch and useLazyFetch wrap typed fetching with reactive request keys and fetch options; useAsyncData supplies default values, transforms, pick, deduplication, cancellation, and status/error refs.
- useState creates keyed reactive hydration state using the $s prefix; clearNuxtState can target all keys, selected keys, or a predicate, then reset defaults or delete values.
- useHead, useHeadSafe, and useSeoMeta obtain the request/server head or injected client head and delegate to Unhead.
- Auto-imports use an Unimport context with an OXC parser, generated #imports exports, source transforms, and composables/utils scanning; component discovery separately scans component directories and exposes components:extend.
- NuxtLink supports visibility and interaction prefetch triggers, opt-outs, a link:prefetch hook, production route-component prefetching, and cleanup of observation and idle callbacks.
- Core initialization registers NuxtLayout, NuxtErrorBoundary, ClientOnly, DevOnly, ServerPlaceholder, and NuxtLink as built-in components.
- Component-island requests have a dedicated /__nuxt_island/ dispatch boundary, and client payload revival can schedule island JSON fetches and retain their results in payload.data.
- The nuxt/server surface exports session management, purpose-specific secret derivation, CORS handling, validated query/body helpers, and request-event types.
- Layered configuration supports theme, _extends, and extends sources, a custom layer resolver, remote-layer support checks, and aliases such as #layers/<name>.
- Development mode regenerates affected templates on builder:watch and can restart when local module files change; Vite DevTools is added by default unless disabled, while telemetry can be disabled through configuration or NUXT_TELEMETRY_DISABLED.
- The experimental @nuxt/vite-server builds a static SPA or SSR fetch handler and supports generation by crawling the server, but explicitly excludes server routes/middleware and HTTP-layer caching, proxying, and CORS rules.