Released in 2018, Nuxt 2.0 marked a major milestone, establishing it as a mainstream framework. Over the past six years, many developers adopted Nuxt 2, leading to the creation of numerous impressive projects across the web.
However, looking forward, maintaining Nuxt 2 is no longer sustainable. With the recent end-of-life of Vue 2 and the maturity of Nuxt 3 and its ecosystem, it's time for our team to concentrate our efforts on the latest major version and upcoming versions.
What happens on June 30th, 2024?
After this date, Nuxt 2 will continue to be available on the NPM package manager, but will no longer receive updates, such as security and browser compatibility fixes. In other words, your applications will continue to work, but you may get deprecation warnings from your package manager reminding you that Nuxt 2 is no longer a supported version.
What’s Next?
Nuxt 3 has been the default version of Nuxt since November 16th, 2022.
On top of using Vue 3 and the composition API, it is shipped with features and innovations:
- Universal & Hybrid Rendering: Benefits of both SPA and SSR, with fine-grained control over route rendering
- Support for serverless environments (AWS Lambda, Deno, Cloudflare Workers) with minimal cold-start.
- First-Class TypeScript Support: Full typing across all components and configurations.
- Vite integration for a faster developer experience
- Server & API routes with end-to-end typing powered by Nitro
- Auto import of composables & utils
- Layers feature for domain driven development
When and if you can, consider migrating to Nuxt 3 to take advantage of these powerful features.
Still on Nuxt 2? Here Are Your Options.
Recognizing the various situations that arise during transitions, we are fully aware that users may need other options until they can migrate, or maybe migration simply isn't a feasible path. Here are some other options to consider:
Update to the Nuxt 2 latest release
We expect to release 2.18.0 at the end of June 2024, which will include a few final fixes.
Purchase Extended Support for Nuxt 2
If you have to stay on Nuxt 2 post-EOL, we have partnered with HeroDevs to offer Nuxt 2 Never-Ending Support (NES). Nuxt 2 NES provides ongoing security and compatibility patches for Nuxt 2 and all official Nuxt Modules (modules released by the Nuxt team, labeled @nuxt/... in the marketplace) even after EOL so that applications with strict compliance requirements remain secure and compliant. It also guarantees that Nuxt 2 applications will continue to operate effectively in modern browsers and maintain compatibility with essential libraries like Vue 2. Moreover, Nuxt 2 NES has continuous security monitoring and an enterprise level SLA with respect to support and fixes.
Nuxt 2 NES is the continuation of the flavor of security support you’ve enjoyed during the Nuxt 2 LTS period — but indefinitely.
Notify Your Users of Your Nuxt 2 Post-EOL Plan
If migrating to Nuxt 3 or using Nuxt 2 NES isn't feasible right now, but you're still on Nuxt 2, it's essential to plan how you'll communicate your security strategy to your customers.
This doesn't affect all Nuxt users, but many teams face restrictions against deploying unsupported software due to SLAs, contracts, or other obligations to clients and partners. These requirements might come from customers, regulatory bodies, or internal company policies. Increasingly, regulatory bodies are setting higher standards for software accountability.
For those with such responsibilities, informing your customers, managers, CISO, or other stakeholders about your plans to handle support and manage potential CVEs is crucial. While Nuxt 2 has only had few vulnerabilities, CVEs can emerge even in well-maintained EOL projects through direct vulnerabilities or compromised dependencies. Staying updated with CVE notifications from organizations like OpenCVE, and Snyk can help you identify issues as they arise. Additionally, browsers occasionally update in ways that can affect legacy libraries—though rare, it’s a possibility to be aware of.
Looking Forward
It is with a heavy heart that I am saying goodbye to Nuxt 2. After many years of working on it and seeing so many websites made with it, this famous loading bar at the top of each Nuxt 2 website will be something I’ll miss a lot! It is with excitement and energy that I will keep working with the core team on the future of Nuxt to keep innovating like we've been doing over these past 8 years.