Nuxt 4.6 Adds a nuxt/server Import Surface and Vue Vapor Mode Interop, Alongside a Rebuilt Nuxt CLI v4 With a 73% Smaller Install

Overview

The Nuxt team released Nuxt 4.6 on October 5, according to the Nuxt 4.6.0 release notes on GitHub. The same notes say that “Alongside the release of Nuxt v4.6, today also brings a new major release of the Nuxt CLI: @nuxt/cli v4.” The headline changes are a server-agnostic import surface called nuxt/server, interop support for Vue 3.6’s Vapor Mode, and a built-in application secret for sessions.

What We Know

A server-agnostic API

The Nuxt 4.6.0 release notes describe nuxt/server as a new import source for server code: handlers, middleware and utilities. According to the same notes, the same handler runs under Nitro v2, Nitro v3 or @nuxt/vite-server, and a module that imports from nuxt/server does not need a peer dependency on h3 or nitropack. Nitro remains the default server. The experimental @nuxt/vite-server is flagged in the notes as highly experimental, with the API expected to change.

Vapor Mode and sessions

The release notes say Nuxt now supports Vue 3.6’s Vapor Mode in interop mode, with individual components opted in through a vapor attribute on <script setup>. Vue 3.6 itself is still in pre-release: the Vue core releases page lists v3.6.0-rc.10, a release candidate, published September 30.

Nuxt 4.6 also adds a root application secret, runtimeConfig.appSecret, set through the NUXT_APP_SECRET environment variable, per the release notes. Sessions are sealed into a cookie with iron, so no server-side storage is needed.

Typed fetch and Nuxt 5 preparation

The notes report that typed $fetch was rebuilt on fetchdts, with peak memory for the same runs dropping from 946 MB to 140 MB. They also state that most of what is new in Nuxt 5 is already in 4.6, either as the default or behind a flag. Upgrading is recommended with npx nuxt upgrade --dedupe, and the release requires Node.js ^22.22.3 || ^24.15.0 || >=26.0.0.

Nuxt CLI v4

The @nuxt/cli v4.0.0 release notes cite more than 200 commits since v3.37. The published comparison against v3.37 lists install size falling from 13.1 MB to 3.5 MB (a 73% reduction), dependencies from 70 to 31, first paint in the dev server from 330 ms to 50 ms, and memory use on Linux from 630 MB to 440 MB. New commands include nuxt curl, nuxt task and nuxt docs, and nuxt dev now shows an interactive terminal interface with keyboard shortcuts.

What We Don’t Know

• The figures above are the Nuxt team’s own measurements; no independent benchmarks were cited in the release notes.
• When Vue 3.6 will reach a stable release, and therefore when Vapor interop will no longer depend on pre-release versions, has not been announced in the sources reviewed.
• No release date for Nuxt 5 appears in the sources reviewed.