usePreviewMode

Preview mode allows you to see how your changes would be displayed on a live site without revealing them to users.

You can use the built-in usePreviewMode composable to access and control preview state in Nuxt. If the composable detects preview mode it will automatically force any updates necessary for useAsyncData and useFetch to rerender preview content.

const { enabled, state } = usePreviewMode()

Options

Custom enable check

You can specify a custom way to enable preview mode. By default the usePreviewMode composable will enable preview mode if there is a preview param in url that is equal to true (for example, http://localhost:3000?preview=true). You can wrap the usePreviewMode into custom composable, to keep options consistent across usages and prevent any errors.

export function useMyPreviewMode () {
  const route = useRoute()
  return usePreviewMode({
    shouldEnable: () => {
      return !!route.query.customPreview
    },
  })
}

Modify default state

usePreviewMode will try to store the value of a token param from url in state. You can modify this state and it will be available for all usePreviewMode calls.

const data1 = ref('data1')

const { enabled, state } = usePreviewMode({
  getState: (currentState) => {
    return { data1, data2: 'data2' }
  },
})

Customize the onEnable and onDisable callbacks

By default, when usePreviewMode is enabled, it will call refreshNuxtData() to re-fetch all data from the server.

When preview mode is disabled, the composable will attach a callback to call refreshNuxtData() to run after a subsequent router navigation.

You can specify custom callbacks to be triggered by providing your own functions for the onEnable and onDisable options.

const { enabled, state } = usePreviewMode({
  onEnable: () => {
    console.log('preview mode has been enabled')
  },
  onDisable: () => {
    console.log('preview mode has been disabled')
  },
})

Example

The example below creates a page where part of a content is rendered only in preview mode.

<script setup>
const { enabled, state } = usePreviewMode()

const { data } = await useFetch('/api/preview', {
  query: {
    apiKey: state.token,
  },
})
</script>

<template>
  <div>
    Some base content
    <p v-if="enabled">
      Only preview content: {{ state.token }}
      <br>
      <button @click="enabled = false">
        disable preview mode
      </button>
    </p>
  </div>
</template>

Now you can generate your site and serve it:

npx nuxt generate
npx nuxt preview

Then you can see your preview page by adding the query param preview to the end of the page you want to see once, for example http://localhost:3000/?preview=true.