Nuxt

Module

There is a community module called nuxt-purgecss to make the usage of PurgeCSS with Nuxt as easy as possible. With it's fitting defaults, you only need to make a few changes (or none at all) to the configuration.

Example

You can see an example using the nuxt-purgecss module in our examples directory.

Manual configuration

Example

You can see an example here.

create-nuxt-app and webpack plugin

This example shows how to set up PurgeCSS with create-nuxt-app Once you initialized your project with

npx create-nuxt-app <project-name>

and selected the options that fit your needs, install the webpack plugin for PurgeCSS together with glob-all:

npm i --save-dev glob-all purgecss-webpack-plugin

You need to modify the file nuxt.config.js by adding he following code:

line 1

import PurgecssPlugin from 'purgecss-webpack-plugin'
import glob from 'glob-all'
import path from 'path'

In your build segment

extractCSS: true

In your build.extend function.

if (!isDev) {
  // Remove unused CSS using PurgeCSS. See https://github.com/FullHuman/purgecss
  // for more information about PurgeCSS.
  config.plugins.push(
    new PurgecssPlugin({
      paths: glob.sync([
        path.join(__dirname, './pages/**/*.vue'),
        path.join(__dirname, './layouts/**/*.vue'),
        path.join(__dirname, './components/**/*.vue')
      ]),
      whitelist: ['html', 'body']
    })
  )
}

Results

This example is importing the tachyons css framework. Without PurgeCSS, the base css file size is 88.2 kB. Using PurgeCSS, the base css file is 1.56 kB

PostCSS plugin

Using the extractCSS option Nuxt will create CSS files that will be loaded separately by the browser. When generating your application this might be a lot of small files.

To include the CSS into the header of the HTML file you'll need to run the following commands. Please note that using this configuration PurgeCSS will be active in production and development mode.

npm i --save-dev @fullhuman/postcss-purgecss

import purgecss from '@fullhuman/postcss-purgecss'

build: {
  postcss: {
    plugins: [
      purgecss({
        content: ['./pages/**/*.vue', './layouts/**/*.vue', './components/**/*.vue'],
        whitelist: ['html', 'body'],
      })
    ]
  }
}