Is Nuxt 3 Really Production Ready?
Tags: nuxt, vue, webdev, programming
Published: 2023-11-23 13:48:59

Nuxt.js is a popular JavaScript frontend framework. But people still ask, if it is production ready. I've been using the framework for the past 5 years in a wide range of different projects, from small hobby websites to big enterprise applications. Here are some of my thoughts on using Nuxt in production and what to be aware of if you decide to do so.

## Is it production ready?

Absolutely!

Nuxt is already used in large web applications in all kinds of different companies across the globe. Just take a look at their show case on https://nuxt.com/showcase . Does OpenAI sound like a familiar name to you? It's homepage was build with Nuxt (last checked Nov, 2023) and probably handles hundreds of millions of requests per month.

Compared to other popular frontend frameworks it is less popular though and they do have fewer collaborators:

| Framework | Github Stars | Used By  | Collaborators | npm downloads|
|-----------|--------------|----------|---------------|------|
| Angular   |        92.1k |  3.1m    | 1.812         |  3.3m|
| Svelte    |        78.9k |      -   |   648         |  1.6m|
| Vue       |         206k |      -   |   362         |  4.3m|
| Nuxt      |       48.6k  |    285k  |   594         |  611k|
| React     |      216k    | 18.5m    | 1.641         | 22.6m|
| Next      |      115k    |  2m      | 2.995         |  5.2m|
_Table: Stats from npm and Github accessed 23.11.2023_

There is no big company behind Nuxt, like it is the case with Google and Angular, Facebook and React or Vercel and Next. 

Nuxt has some decent backers though and at the end of the day what matters is, that they address issues and vulnerabilities quickly and that seems to be the case. New versions get released around every other week.

## What does Nuxt do well?

Nuxt has a strong focus on developer experience. They enable you to move pretty fast and once you get familiar with some core concepts you can focus the bulk of your time on your code logic.

Their pre selected tech stack comes with some pretty neat features out of the box, that enable you to create fast, SEO optimized and beautiful applications.

Features include: 
- TypeScript support out of the box
- SEO Meta tags
- Server Side rendering
- Data fetching with deduplication and caching 
- File based routing
- Component and page transitions
- State management
- Fast build tooling with Vite
- Server functions
- and many more...


Large code bases are absolutely possible with Nuxt and the frameworks seems to hold up against big amounts of traffic quite well.

## What are the downsides?

Nuxt has a very opinionated approach. It can take some time to get familiar with everything and adopt the way they want you to organize your code.

There is lot's of "magic" happening under the hood, which sometimes makes debugging quite hard, especially if you are new to the framework. You will stumble into situations and ask yourself, why is that happening/ not working?? 

On top, while this "magic" can accelerate things, I've found that it mostly covers simple use cases. Once you get outside a simple use case you need to put some thinking effort into fitting your problem into Nuxt concepts without using antipatterns.

Nuxt has a big eco system of tools around it. However, most of these Nuxt modules feel like half baked solutions at the current time. It seems like Nuxt just released too many things at once and can not keep up with it all. When it comes to third party libraries, I'd rather use native JavaScript or Vue libraries instead, that can usually also work with Nuxt with minimal effort. 

## Summary

Can you use Nuxt in production? Absolutely. It has already been used by some large companies for years and has an active community around it. 

Nuxt enables you to move pretty fast, once you are familiar with some core concepts of how Nuxt works. It comes with some neat features that help you to build fast, SEO optimized and beautiful web applications.

The framework is very opinionated though and comes with a learning curve to it. There are a lot of hidden functionalities that can interfere with your code and can be hard to debug. On top, big parts of the ecosystem around Nuxt do not seem to be mature enough yet, to be used in serious production applications but you can always opt for the underlying native JavaScript or Vue library.

What are your thoughts?


## Additional notes
If you need support for your Nuxt or Vue project, feel free to reach out to me via [https://nuxt.wimadev.de](nuxt.wimadev.de?utm-source=is-nuxt-prod-ready)