It's been a while since I delivered the last batch of news about Vue, Nuxt, Vite & co. Let's say the summer and autumn were mildly active. Many updates and countless small improvements were delivered, but the (potentially) groundbreaking releases like Vue 3.6, Nitro v3 or Nuxt 5 are still on the horizon. This is what we've got.

New Vue newsletter launched

The road to Vue 3.6 with Vapor Mode is not there yet, but it is heading to the finish. After the seventeenth and last beta release that was delivered in June, release candidate (RC) versions have been appearing since July. RC.15 was released on 12th November. The changelog mainly shows intense activity on the Vapor functionality. The team wants to make sure everything is as stable and reliable as possible before finally unveiling the anticipated official release of Vue 3.6. Meanwhile, v3.5.45 is the last patch version available on the production line.

Nuxt framework saw two minor version bumps since my last summary article. Version 4.5 from July switched to Vite 8, introduced an SSR streaming feature for faster TTFB, established a standardized set of error codes for easier debugging and added the useLayout composable. Full details can be found in the blog post. Version 4.6 followed in October. It got an overhauled CLI, the ability to import Nitro functions from the nuxt/server alias, more descriptive errors and a ton of other goodies that can be found in the release summary. As of today, v4.6.4 is the last available version.

Meanwhile, after an additional six-month extension, Nuxt v3 finally reached its EOL for good. The very last patch released was 3.21.11 from 5th August. And there are already a couple of vulnerabilities flagged, so if you haven't migrated to v4 yet, you are very much advised to do so as soon as possible. On the verge of AI-orchestrated exploit discovery, you can't stay safe with outdated software for long...

Vite is delivering updates steadily. We already have v8.3.8 as the latest version available. Meanwhile, the 8.2.x, 8.1.x, 7.3.x and even 6.4.x branches are being actively maintained. And there is now much more than just Vite. The unified Rust-based toolchain built atop it, calling itself Vite+, matured enough to be officially released in late September. Personally, I have found neither the courage nor the time to explore its capabilities hands-on and I am still doing fine with my "old" way of working, but if you are about to start something new, why not embrace the power of a single vp command that promises to do everything a JS/TS developer might need? Or if you already did, what was your experience?

Either way, once we build something, we want to test it. Vitest is arguably your weapon of choice when it comes to Vue.js and friends. It saw a big update recently with its version 5 - it is now much faster (as if it wasn't fast enough before) and offers a bunch of new features. And as the ecosystem never sleeps, there is already v5.1.0 offering even more.

Talking about testing, I would like to make a little personal advertisement - I am putting together a plug'n'play solution for testing Nuxt applications. It is a base layer that contains Nuxt, Vitest, Playwright and a bunch of glue to deliver a testing setup you can start using right away. It ships with a CLI that can wire it up into your existing Nuxt app or even scaffold a brand-new one. It also creates example tests for each common way of testing. I call it Nuxt Spec and if you would like to know more, the docs are available HERE.

Before wrapping this up, here are some more brief news:

That's it for now. I hope to manage to do the December issue as well where I would wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year with all the great new tools of Vue.js Ecosystem. Stay tuned!

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