Serverless Hosting

What is Serverless Hosting?

Serverless hosting lets you run code and applications without managing servers directly - you just upload your code and the cloud provider automatically handles all the infrastructure, scaling, and maintenance while charging you only for the actual compute resources you use.

In serverless environments, each user request triggers a fresh instance of your Nuxt server, meaning it starts from scratch every time. This "stateless" nature means you can't store data in server memory or use file-based databases like SQLite. That's why we need to use external database services (like D1, Turso, or PostgreSQL) that persist data independently of your server instances.

Deploy with Serverless

1. Select a database service

Before deploying your project, you need to select a database service:

// 1. Create a PostgreSQL database
// 2. And add the `POSTGRES_URL` to the env variables
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  content: {
    database: {
      type: 'postgres',
      url: process.env.POSTGRES_URL
    }
  }
})

// 1. Create a D1 database in your CF account
// 2. Link it to your project with the same binding name
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  content: {
    database: {
      type: 'd1',
      binding: '<YOUR_BINDING_NAME>'
    }
  }
})

// 1. Create a LibSQL database on Turso.tech
// 2. And add the `TURSO_DATABASE_URL` and `TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN` env variables
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  modules: ['@nuxt/content'],
  content: {
    database: {
      type: 'libsql',
      url: process.env.TURSO_DATABASE_URL,
      authToken: process.env.TURSO_AUTH_TOKEN,
    }
  }
})

// Install the NuxtHub module (see hub.nuxt.com)
export default defineNuxtConfig({
  modules: ['@nuxt/content', '@nuxthub/core'],
  content: {
    database: {
      type: 'd1',
      binding: 'DB'
    }
  },
  hub: {
    database: true
  }
})

2. Deploy your project

Nuxt Content uses Nuxt deployment presets to adjust the build process for different hosting platforms.

Various serverless platform are supported with zero configuration:

• Cloudflare
• NuxtHub
• Vercel
• Netlify

All you need to do is to set the build command to:

nuxi build

The generated output will be compatible with the selected platform.

3. Optimize with pre-rendering

As each request trigger a fresh instance of your Nuxt server, the performance of your serverless application will be impacted if you don't pre-render some pages.

To optimize your serverless application, you can pre-render your pages using the routeRules option:

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  routeRules: {
    '/': { prerender: true }
  }
})