Handle and redirect 404 responses in Nuxt.js

For me, Nuxt is one of the best pieces of software I've ever used. It makes me be so productive building web apps, no matter if they're SPA, Sever Side Rendered (SSR) apps, or static generated sites, following the JAM Stack trend.

Pss, in fact VueDose website is built on Nuxt as a static site 😉

But still, a lot of times find very interesting tricks that are not documented... that needs to stop! Let's share the first hot Nuxt tip!

If you're familiar with Nuxt.js, you should know the concept of pages. You should also know that there is a special Error page (well, it goes into the Layouts folder, but it's a page).

You can override the default error page and customize it to your needs... but what if we want a different behaviour?

In some cases, we might want that when a user visits a non existing page, we redirect him to the home page.

Here's the trick: you can do that easily by creating this pages/*.vue component:

<!-- pages/*.vue -->
<script>
export default {
  asyncData ({ redirect }) {
    return redirect('/')
  }
}
</script>

In Nuxt, routes are defined by the file naming convention. So when we create a *.vue file, we're actually using a wildcard route on Vue Router.

Then, we use the redirect method from the Nuxt context to perform the redirection, whether it's on the client or server.

We do that on the asyncData method since we have the context there, but it would perfectly work with the fetch method as well:

<!-- pages/*.vue -->
<script>
export default {
  fetch({ redirect }) {
    return redirect("/");
  }
};
</script> 

Go and try it out by typing any non-existent url. You should see how it is be redirected. It'd be helpful if you also share VueDose with your colleagues, so they also know about these tips!

See you next week.