Nuxt Tip: Use Nuxt Layers to Share Components, Utils, and Configuration Between Your Apps

Nuxt 3 provides a powerful core feature that allows you to share components, utils, and configurations between your Nuxt 3 applications. These so-called layers are almost identical to a standard Nuxt application, let's take a look at an example.

Create Layer

For this demo, we would like to share two things from our Nuxt layer:

• the Nuxt Tailwind module
• a BaseButton component

To create a new Nuxt layer, visit nuxt.new and select the Layer starter:

To add the Tailwind module, we follow the getting started steps from the module documentation:

First, we install the module:

pnpm add -D @nuxtjs/tailwindcss

Then we add it to the modules section in our nuxt.config.ts:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  modules: ['@nuxtjs/tailwindcss'],
})

Next, we add our BaseComponent in the components folder:

<template>
  <button class="rounded-md border-2 bg-blue-400 p-2 text-white">
    <slot />
  </button>
</template>

For this demo, let's share the layer via NPM. You can easily publish your layer by running the following command:

pnpm publish --access public

It will publish the layer with the name specified in package.json.

The code for this demo Nuxt layer is available at StackBlitz:

Use Layer

Now let's use our Nuxt layer in a Nuxt application. The first step is to install the NPM package of our Nuxt layer:

pnpm add -D @mokkapps/nuxt-layer-demo

Then you need to add the dependency to extends in nuxt.config:

defineNuxtConfig({
  extends: '@mokkapps/nuxt-layer-demo',
})

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  extends: [
    '../base', // Extend from a local layer
    '@my-themes/awesome', // Extend from an installed npm package
    'github:my-themes/awesome#v1', // Extend from a git repository
  ],
})

Without any further configurations, you can now use BaseButton and Tailwind classes in our Nuxt application.

The code for this Nuxt application is interactively available at StackBlitz:

Video

If you prefer visual content, this video from Learn Vue shows the power of Nuxt Layers: