nuxt/website-v2: the source of the documentation Nuxt 2 never retired

A docs site where the Markdown is the codebase

The README is four paragraphs long, which is roughly the right length for a repository whose substance is not in its source files. It states the job, points at v2.nuxt.com as the live instance, and says the pages are generated from `content/`, then invites you to start editing them. That sentence is the actual contribution path: there is no template layer to understand before you can fix a typo in an API description.

The repository tree confirms the shape. `content/` is where the documentation lives, alongside `components/` for Vue components, `pages/` for routes, `i18n/` for translations, `store/`, `plugins/`, `assets/` and `static/`. `docus.config.ts` drives the site generator, `nuxt.config.ts` the Nuxt build, `windi.config.js` the utility CSS setup, and `vercel.json` records the deployment target. There is a `scripts/` directory, a `renovate.json` for dependency updates, and a `.lintstagedrc` alongside Husky, which is the standard pre-commit formatting chain.

What the tree does not show is a test suite. There is no test directory in the listing. For a documentation site that is defensible, since the build either produces pages or fails, but it does mean a content change is validated by the generate step and by review rather than by assertions about the output.

Docus, and a README promise that aged interestingly

The README says the site uses Docus, then adds a parenthetical: we plan to open source it in the following weeks once the documentation is ready. That sentence is interesting now, because Docus is no longer waiting in anyone's wings. It is a set of published npm packages and they sit in `package.json` as ordinary versioned dependencies.

  "dependencies": {
    "@docus/app": "^1.1.3",
    "@docus/github": "^1.0.4",
    "@docus/social-image": "^1.0.3",
    "@docus/theme": "^1.1.5",
    "@docus/twitter": "^1.0.4",

So the plan stated in the README was carried out, just not by this repository and not on the timeline the README anticipated. Worth knowing if you were reading the README and concluded the tooling was unavailable: `@docus/app` at 1.1.3 is what renders these pages, and the other four packages supply GitHub integration, social image generation, the theme and Twitter cards. If you want to build a documentation site on the same generator, these are the packages to look at.

One detail in the dependency list is worth flagging as a maintenance signal rather than a design choice: `@nuxt/typescript-build` is pinned at `^3.0.2` and `@nuxt/types` at `^2.15.8`. A docs site for a framework version in maintenance stays on that version's build tooling, so the dependency graph is a reasonable proxy for how far the project is willing to move.

Running it locally is three commands

Setup is a clone, a cd, and an install.

git clone https://github.com/nuxt/website-v2.git
cd website-v2
npm install

The README then recommends the Docus extension for VS Code, and gives the dev command as `yarn dev`, which starts a server on port 4000. Note the mix: the setup block says `npm install` while the development command says `yarn`, and the repository ships a `yarn.lock`. Both work, but if you want the exact resolution the project maintains, install with yarn.

yarn dev

The `package.json` scripts are thin and conventional for a static site: `dev` runs `nuxt dev`, `build` and `generate` both run `nuxt generate`, `start` runs `nuxt start`, and `prepare` installs Husky hooks. The one non-obvious consequence is that `build` is a generate, not a server build, which is what you want for a docs site deployed as static output on Vercel.

There is also an `.env.example` with two variables, `RECAPTCHA_SITE_KEY` and `API_URL=https://api.nuxtjs.org`. The recaptcha key and the `@nuxtjs/recaptcha` dependency suggest the site has a form that talks to a hosted API, most likely the contact or newsletter path.

The licence only covers part of what you would assume

This is the one place a careful reader should slow down. GitHub reports the licence as NOASSERTION, which means the platform could not classify it from the repository's files. The tree does contain a `LICENSE.md`. And the README's licence section is scoped narrowly: it says design materials for website are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, credited to the Nuxt project.

Read that literally and it covers the logo and the design assets. It does not obviously cover the prose in `content/`, and a NoDerivatives licence is close to unusable for anything you might want to do with documentation text, since NoDerivatives forbids publishing adapted material. So there are three separate signals pointing three different directions: no licence GitHub can classify, a licence file whose contents the README does not describe, and a README grant narrowed to design materials.

The practical reading is that the code and documentation text in this repository are not clearly under a permissive licence, and the design assets are under CC BY-ND. If you want to reuse text from the Nuxt 2 docs in your own project, the safe move is to check `LICENSE.md` directly and, failing that, not to copy. If you want to contribute, you are bound by nothing and the contribution path is open, which is the more common reason people end up in this repository.

A maintained archive rather than a dead one

The metadata puts this in an odd middle. The repository is not archived, and the last push was 2026-09-26, so work is still landing. There is 117 open issues, which is a lot for a documentation site and reads more like accumulated drift than active triage. There is exactly one release, published on 2018-07-31, which tells you releases were never this project's release channel. Forks sit at 1134 against 2240 stars.

The dependency mix explains the shape of the work. Vue ecosystem packages for charts (`vue-chartjs`, `chart.js`), tooltips (`v-tooltip`), click-away handling (`vue-clickaway`), a cookie consent component, a snackbar, and `vue-if-bot` for bot detection, all at 1.x and 2.x versions that belong to the Vue 2 era. There is a `resolutions` block pinning `vue-router` to `^3.5.3`, which is the kind of override you add to keep an ageing graph resolvable.

So the honest summary is a site that still builds and still gets fixes, serving a framework generation that the ecosystem has moved past. For someone learning Nuxt 2 today that documentation is still the reference, and for someone starting fresh it is something to read and move on from. The README does not editorialize about which one you are, and neither does the code.

Editorial conclusion

This repository matters for a narrow and specific reason: it is the editable form of the documentation people still land on when they search for Nuxt 2, which the framework's current docs no longer cover. It is a working site rather than a finished framework, with 117 open issues, a content directory that is the actual product, and a dependency set anchored on Docus 1.x and Nuxt 2.15. The licensing is the one thing to read carefully before reusing anything, because the README grants CC BY-ND 4.0 to design materials specifically and leaves the documentation text itself in a less clear state. If you want to contribute, clone it, run `yarn dev` on port 4000 and edit Markdown in `content/`; if you want to run your own docs site from it, the Docus packages the README once said were coming are now published on npm and listed as ordinary dependencies.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Issues
2. nuxt/website-v2 on GitHub
3. Project website
4. README
5. Releases