Getting Started

Intro

Nitro is an open source framework to build web servers using unjs/h3 and lots of built-in features. Nitro automatically makes your code compatible with any deployment provider and runtime!

Nitro can be used standalone or as the server engine of full-stack frameworks such as Nuxt.

Quick start

Instead of setting up a local development environment, you can use the online playground.

Make sure you have installed the recommended setup:

Latest LTS version of Node.js, or Bun.
Visual Studio Code

Create a new project using starter template:

npx giget@latest nitro nitro-app --install

cd nitro-app

Start the development server:

npm run dev

Nitro is ready at http://localhost:3000/!

Check .nitro/dev/index.mjs if want to know what is happening

Build your production-ready server:

npm run build

Output is in the .output directory and ready to be deployed on almost any provider with no dependencies.

You can try it locally with:

npm run preview

You can find more examples in the Nitro repository: unjs/nitro/examples

Directory structure

The starter template some important files to get you started.

routes/

The routes/ directory contains your application handlers. You can create subdirectories inside routes/ dir to create nested handlers. The file name is the route path.

api/

The api/ directory is similar to routes/ with only difference that routes inside it will be prefixed with /api/ for convenience.

utils/

This directory contains your application utils with auto import support.

plugins/

This directory contains your custom nitro plugins.

nitro.config.ts

The nitro.config.ts file contains the configuration for Nitro.

tsconfig.json

The tsconfig.json file contains the TypeScript configuration for your project.

package.json

The package.json file contains all the dependencies and scripts for your project.