Static Site Generation

nuxi generate crawls your app, prerenders each reachable route to HTML, and outputs to dist — ready for any static host.

4 min read Level 2/5 #nuxt#ssg#generate

What you'll learn

Run nuxi generate to produce a static build
Specify routes explicitly with nitro prerender config
Deploy the output to a static host

When your content does not change per request, you can pre-render every page at build time and deploy plain HTML — no server needed.

nuxi generate

npx nuxi generate

Nuxt starts at / and crawls every internal link it finds, prerendering each as an HTML file. The output lands in dist/ (or .output/public).

Explicit Routes

For pages that are not reachable from / (orphan URLs, dynamic IDs not yet linked), list them explicitly:

// nuxt.config.ts
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  nitro: {
    prerender: {
      routes: [
        '/sitemap.xml',
        '/blog/welcome',
        '/blog/release-notes'
      ],
      crawlLinks: true
    }
  }
})

Where to Deploy

Any static host works:

Cloudflare Pages
Netlify
Vercel (it auto-detects SSG)
GitHub Pages
S3 + CloudFront

Upload dist/ and you are done. No Node runtime, no scaling concerns.

Caveats

Every prerendered page is frozen at build time — you redeploy to update content.
useFetch runs at build time; pages get the data captured then. For freshness, swap to SWR or ISR (next lessons).
Routes generated dynamically (e.g. user profiles) require either listing them all or switching that path to SSR/SWR via routeRules.

Hybrid Rendering With routeRules →