Nuxt/docs/1.getting-started/9.prerendering.md

title	description	navigation.icon
Prerendering	Nuxt allows pages to be statically rendered at build time to improve certain performance or SEO metrics	i-ph-code-block-duotone

Nuxt allows for select pages from your application to be rendered at build time. Nuxt will serve the prebuilt pages when requested instead of generating them on the fly.

:read-more{title="Nuxt rendering modes" to="/docs/guide/concepts/rendering"}

Crawl-based Pre-rendering

Use the nuxi generate command to build and pre-render your application using the Nitro crawler. This command is similar to nuxt build with the nitro.static option set to true, or running nuxt build --prerender.

This will build your site, stand up a nuxt instance, and, by default, prerender the root page / along with any of your site's pages it links to, any of your site's pages they link to, and so on.

npx nuxi generate

You can now deploy the .output/public directory to any static hosting service or preview it locally with npx serve .output/public.

Working of the Nitro crawler:

1. Load the HTML of your application's root route (/), any non-dynamic pages in your ~/pages directory, and any other routes in the nitro.prerender.routes array.
2. Save the HTML and payload.json to the ~/.output/public/ directory to be served statically.
3. Find all anchor tags (<a href="...">) in the HTML to navigate to other routes.
4. Repeat steps 1-3 for each anchor tag found until there are no more anchor tags to crawl.

This is important to understand since pages that are not linked to a discoverable page can't be pre-rendered automatically.

::read-more{to="/docs/api/commands/generate#nuxi-generate"} Read more about the nuxi generate command. ::

Selective Pre-rendering

You can manually specify routes that Nitro will fetch and pre-render during the build or ignore routes that you don't want to pre-render like /dynamic in the nuxt.config file:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  nitro: {
    prerender: {
      routes: ["/user/1", "/user/2"],
      ignore: ["/dynamic"],
    },
  },
});

You can combine this with the crawlLinks option to pre-render a set of routes that the crawler can't discover like your /sitemap.xml or /robots.txt:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  nitro: {
    prerender: {
      crawlLinks: true,
      routes: ["/sitemap.xml", "/robots.txt"],
    },
  },
});

Setting nitro.prerender to true is similar to nitro.prerender.crawlLinks to true.

::read-more{to="https://nitro.unjs.io/config#prerender"} Read more about pre-rendering in the Nitro documentation. ::

Lastly, you can manually configure this using routeRules.

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  routeRules: {
    // Set prerender to true to configure it to be prerendered
    "/rss.xml": { prerender: true },
    // Set it to false to configure it to be skipped for prerendering
    "/this-DOES-NOT-get-prerendered": { prerender: false },
    // Everything under /blog gets prerendered as long as it
    // is linked to from another page
    "/blog/**": { prerender: true },
  },
});

::read-more{to="https://nitro.unjs.io/config/#routerules"} Read more about Nitro's routeRules configuration. ::

As a shorthand, you can also configure this in a page file using defineRouteRules.

::read-more{to="/docs/guide/going-further/experimental-features#inlinerouterules" icon="i-ph-star-duotone"} This feature is experimental and in order to use it you must enable the experimental.inlineRouteRules option in your nuxt.config. ::

<script setup>
// Or set at the page level
defineRouteRules({
  prerender: true,
});
</script>

<template>
  <div>
    <h1>Homepage</h1>
    <p>Pre-rendered at build time</p>
  </div>
</template>

This will be translated to:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  routeRules: {
    "/": { prerender: true },
  },
});

Runtime prerender configuration

prerenderRoutes

You can use this at runtime within a Nuxt context to add more routes for Nitro to prerender.

<script setup>
prerenderRoutes(["/some/other/url"]);
</script>

<template>
  <div>
    <h1>This will register other routes for prerendering when prerendered</h1>
  </div>
</template>

:read-more{title="prerenderRoutes" to="/docs/api/utils/prerender-routes"}

prerender:routes Nuxt hook

This is called before prerendering for additional routes to be registered.

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  hooks: {
    async "prerender:routes"(ctx) {
      const { pages } = await fetch("https://api.some-cms.com/pages").then(
        (res) => res.json(),
      );
      for (const page of pages) {
        ctx.routes.add(`/${page.name}`);
      }
    },
  },
});

prerender:generate Nitro hook

This is called for each route during prerendering. You can use this for fine grained handling of each route that gets prerendered.

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  nitro: {
    hooks: {
      "prerender:generate"(route) {
        if (route.route?.includes("private")) {
          route.skip = true;
        }
      },
    },
  },
});