Nuxt 4.3

Nuxt 4.3 brings powerful new features for layouts, caching, and developer experience – plus significant performance improvements under the hood.

📣 Some News

Extended v3 Support

Early this month, I opened a discussion to find out how the upgrade had gone from v3 to v4. I was really pleased to hear how well it had gone for most people.

Having said that, we're committed to making sure no one gets left behind. And so we will continue to provide security updates and critical bug fix releases beyond the previously announced end-of-life date of January 31, 2026, meaning Nuxt v3 will meet its end-of-life on July 31, 2026.

Preparing for Nuxt 5

We're closer than ever to the releases of Nuxt v5 and Nitro v3. In the coming weeks, the main branch of the Nuxt repository will begin receiving initial commits for Nuxt 5. However, it's still business as usual.

• Continue making pull requests to the main branch
• We'll backport changes to the 4.x and 3.x branches

Keep an eye out on the Upgrade Guide – we'll be adding details about how you can already start migrating your projects to prepare for Nuxt v4 with future.compatibilityVersion: 5.

🗂️ Route Rule Layouts

But that's enough about the future. We have a lot of good things for you today!

First, you can now set layouts directly in route rules using the new appLayout property (#31092). This provides a centralized, declarative way to manage layouts across your application without scattering definePageMeta calls throughout your pages.

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  routeRules: {
    '/admin/**': { appLayout: 'admin' },
    '/dashboard/**': { appLayout: 'dashboard' },
    '/auth/**': { appLayout: 'minimal' }
  }
})

This might be useful for:

• Admin panels with a shared layout across many routes
• Marketing pages that need a different layout from the app

📦 ISR/SWR Payload Extraction

Payload extraction now works with ISR (incremental static regeneration), SWR (stale-while-revalidate) and cache routeRules (#33467). Previously, only pre-rendered pages could generate _payload.json files.

This means:

• Client-side navigation to ISR/SWR pages can use cached payloads
• CDNs (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare) can cache payload files alongside HTML
• Fewer API calls during navigation – data can be prefetched and served from the cached payload

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  routeRules: {
    '/products/**': { 
      isr: 3600, // Revalidate every hour
    }
  }
})

🧹 Dev Mode Payload Extraction

Related to the above, payload extraction now also works in development mode (#30784). This makes it easier to test and debug payload behavior without needing to run a production build.

🚫 Disable Modules from Layers

When extending Nuxt layers, you can now disable specific modules that you don't need (#33883). Just pass false to the module's options:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  extends: ['../shared-layer'],
  // disable @nuxt/image from layer
  image: false,
})

🏷️ Route Groups in Page Meta

Route groups (folders wrapped in parentheses like (protected)/) are now exposed in page meta (#33460). This makes it easy to check which groups a route belongs to in middleware or anywhere you have access to the route.

<script setup lang="ts">
// This page's meta will include: { groups: ['protected'] }
useRoute().meta.groups
</script>

export default defineNuxtRouteMiddleware((to) => {
  if (to.meta.groups?.includes('protected') && !isAuthenticated()) {
    return navigateTo('/login')
  }
})

This provides a clean, convention-based approach to route-level authorization without needing to add definePageMeta to every protected page.

🎨 Layout Props with setPageLayout

The setPageLayout composable now accepts a second parameter to pass props to your layout (#33805):

export default defineNuxtRouteMiddleware((to) => {
  setPageLayout('admin', {
    sidebar: true,
    theme: 'dark'
  })
})

<script setup lang="ts">
defineProps<{
  sidebar?: boolean
  theme?: 'light' | 'dark'
}>()
</script>

🔧 #server Alias

A new #server alias provides clean imports within your server directory (#33870), similar to how #shared works:

// Before: relative path hell
import { helper } from '../../../../utils/helper'

// After: clean and predictable
import { helper } from '#server/utils/helper'

The alias includes import protection – you can't accidentally import #server code from client or shared contexts.

🪟 Draggable Error Overlay

The development error overlay introduced in Nuxt 4.2 is now draggable and can be minimized (#33695). You can:

• Drag it to any corner of the screen (it snaps to edges)
• Minimize it to a small pill button when you want to keep working
• Your position and minimized state persist across page reloads

This is a quality-of-life improvement when you're iterating on fixes and don't want the overlay blocking your view.

⚙️ Async Plugin Constructors

Module authors can now use async functions when adding build plugins (#33619):

export default defineNuxtModule({
  async setup() {
    // Lazy load only when actually needed
    addVitePlugin(() => import('my-cool-plugin').then(r => r.default()))
    
    // No need to load webpack plugin if using Vite
    addWebpackPlugin(() => import('my-cool-plugin/webpack').then(r => r.default()))
  }
})

This enables true lazy loading of build plugins, avoiding unnecessary code loading when plugins aren't needed.

🚀 Performance Improvements

This release includes several performance optimizations for faster builds:

• Hook filters - Internal plugins now use filters to avoid running hooks unnecessarily (#33898)
• SSR styles optimization - The nuxt:ssr-styles plugin is now significantly faster (#33862, #33865)
• Layer alias transform - Skipped when using Vite (it handles this natively) (#33864)
• Route rules compilation - Route rules are now compiled into a client chunk using rou3, removing the need for radix3 in the client bundle and eliminating app manifest fetches (#33920)

🎨 Inline Styles for Webpack/Rspack

The inlineStyles feature now works with webpack and rspack builders (#33966), not just Vite. This enables critical CSS inlining for better Core Web Vitals regardless of your bundler choice.

⚠️ Deprecations

statusCode → status, statusMessage → statusText

In preparation for Nitro v3 and H3 v2, we're moving to use Web API naming conventions (#33912). The old properties still work but are deprecated in advance of v5:

- throw createError({ statusCode: 404, statusMessage: 'Not Found' })
+ throw createError({ status: 404, statusText: 'Not Found' })

🐛 Bug Fixes

Notable fixes in this release:

• Fixed head component deduplication using key attribute (#33958, #33963)
• Fixed async data properties not being reactive in Options API (#34119)
• Fixed useCookie unsafe number parsing during decode (#34007)
• Fixed NuxtPage not re-rendering when nested NuxtLayout has layouts disabled (#34078)
• Fixed client-side pathname decoding for non-ASCII route aliases (#34043)
• Fixed suspense remounting when navigating after pending state (#33991)
• Fixed clipboard copy in error overlay (#33873)
• Enabled allowArbitraryExtensions by default in TypeScript config (#34084)
• Added noUncheckedIndexedAccess to server tsconfig for safer typing (#33985)

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

📚 Documentation

• Improved module author guides with clearer structure (#33803)
• Added MCP setup instructions for Claude Desktop (#33914)
• Added layers directory documentation (#33967)
• Added Deno package manager examples (#34070)
• Clarified type-checking context limitations for server routes (#33964)

🎉 Nuxt 3.21.0

Alongside v4.3.0, we're releasing Nuxt v3.21.0 with many of the same improvements backported to the 3.x branch. This release includes:

• All the same features: Route rule layouts, ISR payload extraction, layout props with setPageLayout, #server alias, draggable error overlay, and more
• All performance improvements: SSR styles optimization, hook filters, and route rules compilation
• Module disabling: Disable layer modules by setting options to false
• Critical bug fixes: Async data reactivity in Options API, useCookie number parsing, head component deduplication, and more

✅ Upgrading

Our recommendation for upgrading is to run:

npx nuxt upgrade --dedupe

# or, if you are upgrading to v3.21
npx nuxt@latest upgrade --dedupe --channel=v3

This will deduplicate your lockfile and help ensure you pull in updates from other dependencies that Nuxt relies on, particularly in the unjs ecosystem.

👉 Full Release Notes

Thank you to all of the many contributors to this release! 💚