Generating a standalone website

We now have a functional portfolio. This type of website has very static content: it doesn’t change depending on the visitor and will probably not receive daily updates in terms of code! This means that we can optimize the output of what we will deploy to the public.

The portfolio we’ve created is a perfect use case for static site generation. Normally, Nuxt would run as an active process on a server, where it can respond directly to requests and fetch data in real time. A good example is the Quiz server we built in Chapter 8. But since we don’t need real-time data when publishing, we can leverage another capability of Nuxt. When generating a static site, Nuxt runs as an application initially and indexes all of the internal links. For every internal link, it will retrieve the data from the server once and then write the output to a static collection of files.

Let’s see this in action! The command is already part of our...