Out of the box, Nuxt.js gives you its own loading progress bar component that's shown between routes. You can customize it, disable it or even create your own loading component.

Customising the Progress Bar

Among other properties, the color, size, duration and direction of the progress bar can be customized to suit your application's needs. This is done by updating the loading property of the nuxt.config.js with the corresponding properties.

For example, to set a blue progress bar with a height of 5px, we update the nuxt.config.js to the following:

export default {
  loading: {
    color: 'blue',
    height: '5px'
  }
}

List of properties to customize the progress bar.

Disable the Progress Bar

If you don't want to display the progress bar between the routes add loading: false in your nuxt.config.js file:

export default {
  loading: false
}

The loading property gives you the option to disable the default loading progress bar on a specific page.

<template>
  <h1>My page</h1>
</template>

<script>
  export default {
    loading: false
  }
</script>

Programmatically starting the loading bar

The loading bar can also be programmatically started in your components by calling this.$nuxt.$loading.start() to start the loading bar and this.$nuxt.$loading.finish() to finish it.

During your page component's mounting process, the $loading property may not be immediately available to access. To work around this, if you want to start the loader in the mounted method, make sure to wrap your $loading method calls inside this.$nextTick as shown below.

export default {
  mounted() {
    this.$nextTick(() => {
      this.$nuxt.$loading.start()
      setTimeout(() => this.$nuxt.$loading.finish(), 500)
    })
  }
}

Internals of the Progress Bar

Unfortunately, it is not possible for the Loading component to know in advance how long loading a new page will take. Therefore, it is not possible to accurately animate the progress bar to 100% of the loading time.

Nuxt's loading component partially solves this by letting you set the duration, this should be set to an estimate of how long the loading process will take. Unless you use a custom loading component, the progress bar will always move from 0% to 100% in duration time (regardless of actual progression). When the loading takes longer than duration time, the progress bar will stay at 100% until the loading finishes.

You can change the default behaviour by setting continuous to true, then after reaching 100% the progress bar will start shrinking back to 0% again in duration time. When the loading is still not finished after reaching 0% it will start growing from 0% to 100% again, this repeats until the loading finishes.

export default {
  loading: {
    continuous: true
  }
}

Example of a continuous progress bar:

Using a Custom Loading Component

You can also create your own component that Nuxt.js will call instead of the default loading progress bar component. To do so, you need to give a path to your component in the loading option. Then, your component will be called directly by Nuxt.js.

Your component has to expose some of these methods:

You can create your custom component in components/LoadingBar.vue:

<template>
  <div v-if="loading" class="loading-page">
    <p>Loading...</p>
  </div>
</template>

<script>
  export default {
    data: () => ({
      loading: false
    }),
    methods: {
      start() {
        this.loading = true
      },
      finish() {
        this.loading = false
      }
    }
  }
</script>

<style scoped>
  .loading-page {
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.8);
    text-align: center;
    padding-top: 200px;
    font-size: 30px;
    font-family: sans-serif;
  }
</style>

Then, you update your nuxt.config.js to tell Nuxt.js to use your component:

export default {
  loading: '~/components/LoadingBar.vue'
}

The loading indicator Property

When running Nuxt.js in SPA mode, there is no content from the server side on the first page load. So, instead of showing a blank page while the page loads, Nuxt.js gives you a spinner which you can customize to add your own colors or background and even change the the indicator.

export default {
  loadingIndicator: {
    name: 'circle',
    color: '#3B8070',
    background: 'white'
  }
}

Built-in indicators

These indicators are imported from awesome Spinkit project. You can check out its demo page to preview the spinners. In order to use one of these spinners all you have to do is add it's name to the name property. No need to import or install anything. Here is a list of built in indicators you can use.

• circle
• cube-grid
• fading-circle
• folding-cube
• chasing-dots
• nuxt
• pulse
• rectangle-bounce
• rotating-plane
• three-bounce
• wandering-cubes

Built-in indicators support color and background options.

Custom indicators

If you need your own special indicator, a String value or Name key can also be a path to a html template of indicator source code! All of the options are passed to the template, too.

Nuxt's built-in source code is also available if you need a base!