Nuxt 4.4

🏭 createUseFetch and createUseAsyncData

You can now create custom instances of useFetch and useAsyncData with your own default options (#32300).

// Simple defaults
export const useClientFetch = createUseFetch({
  server: false,
})

// Dynamic defaults with full control over merging
export const useApiFetch = createUseFetch((currentOptions) => {
  const runtimeConfig = useRuntimeConfig()

  return {
    ...currentOptions,
    baseURL: currentOptions.baseURL ?? runtimeConfig.public.baseApiUrl,
  }
})

Then use them exactly like useFetch – they're fully typed and support all the same options:

<script setup lang="ts">
// Uses your baseURL from runtimeConfig automatically
const { data: users } = await useApiFetch('/users')
</script>

When you pass a plain object, your usage options automatically override the defaults. When you pass a function, you get full control over how options are merged – which means you can compose interceptors, headers, and other complex options however you need.

Under the hood, this is powered by a new Nuxt ad-hoc module that scans your composables directory and automatically registers your custom instances for key injection – so they work seamlessly with SSR, just like useAsyncData and useFetch.

There's also createUseAsyncData for the same pattern with useAsyncData.

🗺️ Vue Router v5

We've upgraded to vue-router v5 (#34181), which removes the dependency on unplugin-vue-router. This is the first major vue-router upgrade since Nuxt 3, and it comes with a bunch of improvements under the hood.

For most apps, this should be a transparent upgrade. If you're using unplugin-vue-router directly, you can remove it from your dependencies.

The next step will be taking typed routes out of experimental status. 👀

💪 Typed Layout Props in definePageMeta

You can now pass props to your layouts directly from definePageMeta (#34262). This means your layouts can be parameterised per-page without needing to use provide/inject or other workarounds. Check out the updated docs for the full details.

definePageMeta({
  layout: {
    name: 'panel',
    props: {
      sidebar: true,
      title: 'Dashboard',
    },
  },
})

Even better – the props are fully typed (#34409). If your layout defines props, you'll get autocomplete and type-checking in definePageMeta.

<script setup lang="ts">
defineProps<{
  sidebar?: boolean
  title?: string
}>()
</script>

🗣️ useAnnouncer Composable

Accessibility got a major boost with the new useAnnouncer composable and <NuxtAnnouncer> component (#34318). While useRouteAnnouncer handles page navigation for screen readers, many apps need to announce dynamic in-page changes – form submissions, loading states, search results, and more.

<template>
  <NuxtAnnouncer />
  <NuxtRouteAnnouncer />
  <NuxtLayout>
    <NuxtPage />
  </NuxtLayout>
</template>

<script setup lang="ts">
const { polite, assertive } = useAnnouncer()

async function submitForm() {
  try {
    await $fetch('/api/contact', { method: 'POST', body: formData })
    polite('Message sent successfully')
  }
  catch (error) {
    assertive('Error: Failed to send message')
  }
}
</script>

🚀 Migrate to unrouting

We've migrated Nuxt's file-system route generation to unrouting (#34316), which uses a trie data structure for constructing routes. The cold start is roughly the same (~8ms vs ~6ms for large apps), but dev server changes are up to 28x faster when you're not adding/removing pages, and ~15% faster even when you are.

This also makes route generation more deterministic – it's no longer sensitive to page file ordering.

🍫 Smarter Payload Handling for Cached Routes

When a cached route (ISR/SWR) is rendered at runtime with payload extraction enabled, the browser immediately fetches _payload.json as a second request – which triggers a full SSR re-render of the same page. In serverless environments, this can spin up a second lambda before the first response has even finished streaming.

This release addresses this with two changes (#34410):

1. A new payloadExtraction: 'client' mode that inlines the full payload in the initial HTML response while still generating _payload.json for client-side navigation
2. A runtime in-memory LRU payload cache so that _payload.json requests can be served without a full re-render

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  experimental: {
    payloadExtraction: 'client',
  },
})

🍪 refresh Option for useCookie

If you're using cookies for session management, you've probably run into the problem of needing to extend a cookie's expiration without changing its value. The new refresh option makes this simple (#33814):

const session = useCookie('session-id', {
  maxAge: 60 * 60,
  refresh: true,
})

// Extends expiration each time, even with the same value
session.value = session.value

♻️ useState Reset to Default

useState and clearNuxtState now support resetting to the initial value instead of clearing to undefined (#33527). This aligns with how useAsyncData handles resets and is more intuitive for state management.

const count = useState('counter', () => 0)
count.value = 42

// Resets to 0 (the init value), not undefined
clearNuxtState('counter')

🕵️‍♂️ Better Import Protection

Inspired by features in TanStack Start, import protection now shows suggestions and a full trace of where a problematic import originated (#34454). This makes it much easier to debug why a server-only import ended up in your client bundle.

For example, if you accidentally import from a server route in a component:

The trace shows the import chain (the component was imported from a page), the exact line of code, and actionable suggestions for how to fix it.

We plan to continue work on improving our error messages. 🪵

🔮 View Transitions Types

You can now define view transition types in Nuxt's experimental view transitions support (#31982). This lets you use different transition styles for different navigation patterns (forwards vs. backwards, tabs vs. pages, etc.).

💡 Improved optimizeDeps Hints

When Vite discovers new dependencies at runtime and triggers page reloads, Nuxt now shows a clear, copy-pasteable nuxt.config.ts snippet to pre-bundle them (#34320). It also warns about unresolvable entries at startup.

🏷️ Normalised Page Component Names (Experimental)

A new experimental option normalises page component names to match route names (#33513), which can help with consistency in devtools and debugging.

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  experimental: {
    normalizeComponentNames: true,
  },
})

⚡ Build Profiling

Ever wondered where your build time goes? You can now get a detailed performance breakdown of your Nuxt builds (#34468, nuxt/cli#1243):

nuxt build --profile

This produces a report showing duration, RSS delta, and heap delta for every build phase, module, and bundler plugin:

It also profiles individual modules and bundler plugins, making it easy to spot bottlenecks. Three output formats are written:

• Chrome Trace (.nuxt/perf-trace.json) – open in chrome://tracing or Perfetto for a visual timeline
• JSON report (.nuxt/perf-report.json) – machine-readable data for tracking over time
• CPU profile (nuxt-build.cpuprofile) – open in Chrome DevTools or VS Code for flame graphs

For even more detail, use --profile=verbose to print timing breakdowns to the console.

We'll be using this feature to make Nuxt even faster – and if performance is something you care about, this might be a good opportunity to contribute!

🔥 Performance Improvements

• 14,000x faster module ID parsing – replaced new URL() + regex chain with a single indexOf + slice (#34451)
• Disabled NuxtLink visibility prefetching in dev – stops Vite from discovering and reloading deps unnecessarily during development (#34325)

⬆︎ Upgrading

Our recommendation for upgrading is to run:

npx nuxt upgrade --dedupe

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! 💚