Nuxt 4.6 adds nuxt/server so server code stops depending on Nitro and h3 versions
Serguey Asael Shinder2 min readNuxt 4.6.0, released on 5 October, is described by the team as one of its biggest minor releases, with more than 420 commits since 4.5.2. Its central change is architectural: making Nuxt server-agnostic.
nuxt/server. Until now, server code and many modules imported directly from h3 and nitropack, so every new major of those packages rippled through the ecosystem. Nuxt now defines its own types for the request event, route rules and typed $fetch, and exposes a new import source, nuxt/server, for handlers, middleware and server utilities. The team says server code written against it on 4.6 runs unchanged on Nuxt 5, which moves to Nitro v3 and h3 v2. Nitro remains the default implementation; an experimental alternative, @nuxt/vite-server, builds the server with Vite's Environment API, though the release notes stress that Nitro is still the right choice for almost everyone.
A smaller, faster CLI. @nuxt/cli v4 ships with Nuxt. By the team's own figures, install size falls from 13.1 MB to 3.5 MB, dependencies from 70 to 31, first paint of nuxt dev from 330 ms to 50 ms, and memory at rest on Linux from 630 MB to 440 MB. nuxt dev gets an interactive terminal UI and a lock file in .nuxt/ that lets a second dev server, for example one started by an agent, take over or defer to the first.
One secret. A root application secret, runtimeConfig.appSecret (set via NUXT_APP_SECRET), from which modules derive purpose-specific secrets. The first consumer is a set of session helpers that seal the session into a cookie, so no server-side storage is needed. Builds never generate the secret; development does, with a warning.
Vue Vapor. Components or pages can opt into Vue 3.6's Vapor mode with a vapor attribute on <script setup>, while the app root stays on the virtual DOM. This requires Vue 3.6.0-rc.2 or newer.
Security fixes include making the internal error route reachable only from an error render and no longer passing unhandled error data to the error page.
Upgrading needs Node.js ^22.22.3, ^24.15.0 or 26 and later; the team recommends npx nuxt upgrade --dedupe. Nuxt 3 reached end of life on 31 July, so there is no 3.x release alongside this one.