content: Nuxt 3 Static Site Generation does not generate anything for content

Environment

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- Operating System: `Darwin`
- Node Version:     `v19.1.0`
- Nuxt Version:     `3.1.1`
- Nitro Version:    `2.1.0`
- Package Manager:  `npm@8.19.3`
- Builder:          `vite`
- User Config:      `routeRules`, `ssr`, `postcss`, `app`, `modules`, `content`, `runtimeConfig`
- Runtime Modules:  `@nuxt/content@2.4.3`
- Build Modules:    `-`
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Reproduction

Create a nuxt 3 project and add a /content directory

Add any .md to the /content directory

Run npx nuxi generate

Instead of static content actually being generated, an /api/_content/<query or navigation>/<somestring>.json file is created.

This means that the statement You can now deploy .output/public to any static hosting! is false; you cannot simply upload the contents of .output/public and expect it to work; you need a server with routing back to the main index.html.

This negates any SEO benefit for using the /content with Nuxt 3

Describe the bug

As stated, using generate does not generate any static content from the /content directory, negating any SEO benefit. Ideally, anything in .output/public could be uploaded to, say, S3 with static website hosting enabled, and it would work.

The fact it outputs JSON files and expects all requests to route back to the main index.html file means that:

The content is not static, it needs to fetch data asynchronously from the server, even if that data is static JSON
Any SEO benefit that existed in Nuxt 2 using generate no longer exists in Nuxt 3.

Is there something I’m missing? This should be working if we’re calling this “stable”, no?

Additional context

No response

Logs

No response

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created a year ago
Reactions: 9
Comments: 19 (10 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

NOTE: A workaround for this is to manually define every route in nuxt.config.ts, like:

// https://nuxt.com/docs/api/configuration/nuxt-config
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  nitro: {
    prerender: {
      routes: ['/every', '/single', '/route', '/that', '/has', '/ever', '/existed']
    }
  }
})

To be honest, this is tedious; the only way to get around this is to write something that crawls the content in the /content directory and adds it to this config. Which…why doesn’t nuxt 3 just do it outright?

davidcrandall99 on Feb 8, 2023

I cannot get Nuxt to generate my markdown files. Frustrating because my old blog on Nuxt 2 worked way more easily.

WhalenSITHS on May 18, 2023

When Nitro crawls your website, it does the same job that is done by a Google Bot (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/googlebot).

Nitro request your serveur
Nitro find every anchor tag and get the href
Nitro request each href found in the previous step and return to step 2 recursively

You can take a look at Docus, https://github.com/nuxt-themes/docus or Alpine, https://github.com/nuxt-themes/alpine, to understand how things works.

Barbapapazes on Jul 18, 2023

I think there is a miss understanding of how nuxt/content works.

/content is like a database where you can store Markdown, JSON, CSV and more. Alone, they do nothing and they do not represent a page. But nuxt/content gives us a tool to query this database called queryContent.

Nitro, on its side, will start at / (from your server so <ip>:<port>/) and crawls into your site using anchor tags. So Nitro is not aware of the /content folder (which is like database).

Knowing this, we understand that you have 3 solutions:

Adding navigation links in your / to crawling by Nitro
Adding manually your path into the prerender routes array
Create a Nitro plugin which add routes (querying using nuxt/content) to the prerender routes array

Barbapapazes on Jul 18, 2023

We actually generate our docs with Content and it works perfectly.

Happy to help but we will need a reproduction, cannot guess without looking at the code

Atinux on May 19, 2023