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Using NuxtJS for dynamic routes without server target – Nginx

I always thought that frontend should not be over bloated in size, usually by "frontend" I imagined a set of HTML, CSS and JS files, which are kind of small, especially when minified and compressed. So you can use whatever framework or library you love, your dev node_modules could be enormous in size, but after the compilation you get something lightweight to be served e.g by Nginx. Yeah, I just described an SPA-like setup, not an SSR when there’s a server process running.

I had an experience building a website with NuxtJS, and it has only runtime logic, so no backend was required. I just did yarn generate and served all the resulted static with Nginx.

Now I’m building an application which requires a backend (it’s a separate Python process), with dynamic pages like /users/john and /users/jane. Nuxt documentation says I can’t use generate option anymore, cause such routing is dynamic. (technically I can write a set of fetch functions to load users from API during build time and generate corresponding pages, but it doesn’t work well for runtime data). The only option is to use server target of NuxtJs.

There’s even a page describing how to serve Nuxt application with Nginx. It assumes you should use yarn start command, which starts a Node process. It works fine, dynamic content is routed, caching is performed by Nginx, but.. it doesn’t fit in a model that "frontend is lightweight". I use docker, and it means that now I need to bring huge node_modules with me. nuxt package itself is about 200 MB, which is kinda big for a small frontend app. I can run yarn install --production to save some space, but it still doesn’t solve an issue that resulted image is huge.

Previously, when I wrote some apps in React, they resulted in a single index.html which I served by Nginx. It means, such dynamic routing was handled by frontend, using react-router or similar stuff.

To better understand my concerns, here’s some rough comparison:

  • My old React apps: ~5 MB of disk space, 0 RAM, 0 CPU, routing is done by index.html file
  • My previous site with Nuxt static option: ~5 MB of disk space, 0 RAM, 0 CPU, routing is done by file system (/page1/index.html, /page2/index.html)
  • My current site with Nuxt server option: ~ 400 MB or even more disk space for a docker image, RAM, CPU, routing is done by Nuxt runtime

I don’t really want to overcomplicate things. Allocating a lot of resources for a simple web app is too much, especially when you can solve the task with a help of a few static files.

The questions are:

  1. Am I missing some option in NuxtJS to solve my issue?
  2. Am I just misusing NuxtJS, and it’s better to get plain VueJS, some vue-router, and develop the app as I described in "previously with react" section?
Tags:

3

Answers


  1. 0

    I think you are making a mistake here about SPA mode.

    Assume that you have a page named users in your Nuxt pages, your folder structure is like this:

    [pages]
    [users]
        [_name]
            index.vue

    When you requesting /users/john you can take the john from params and making an axios call to your server.

    After that, you can use the nuxt generate command to create your dist folder and after that serve the dist folder with Nginx. Everything will work fine.

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  2. 0

    Check this simple routing approach in the browser

    const routes = {
  '/': Home,
  '/users': Users
}

new Vue({
  el: '#app',
  data: {
    currentRoute: window.location.pathname
  },
  computed: {
    ViewComponent () {
      return routes[this.currentRoute] || NotFound
    }
  },
  render (h) { return h(this.ViewComponent) }
})

    In the Users component integrate with your python backend.

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  3. 0

    You can use SPA mode in NuxtJS (mode: 'spa', or ssr: false, in latest versions), then run yarn generate or nuxt generate, it will generate a full bundle in dist folder that can be served with any HTTP server.

    This works fine with all dynamic routes, I tested it with simple php -S localhost:8000 that’s just serves a folder via HTTP.

    This works due to a trick with 200.html https://dev.to/adnanbabakan/deploy-a-single-page-application-with-200-html-2p0f

    For my project it generated all needed data and folder size is just 13mb (with all images, fonts, etc…).

    You can read more about how static routing is done in Nuxt docs: https://router.vuejs.org/guide/essentials/history-mode.html#example-server-configurations

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