Deploying using PM2 (Process Manager 2) is a fast and easy solution for hosting your universal Nuxt application on your server or VM.

In this guide, we build the application locally and serve it though a PM2 config file with the cluster mode activated. Cluster mode will prevent downtime by allowing applications to be scaled across multiple CPUs.

Getting Started

Make sure you have pm2 installed on your server. If not, simply globally install it from yarn or npm.

# yarn pm2 install
$ sudo yarn global add pm2 --prefix /usr/local
# npm pm2 install
$ npm install pm2 -g

Configure your application

All you need to add to your universal Nuxt app for serving it though PM2 is a file called ecosystem.config.js. Create a new file with that name in your root project directory and add the following content:

module.exports = {
  apps: [
    {
      name: 'NuxtAppName',
      exec_mode: 'cluster',
      instances: 'max', // Or a number of instances
      script: './node_modules/nuxt/bin/nuxt.js',
      args: 'start'
    }
  ]
}

Build and serve the app

Now build your app with npm run build.

And serve it with pm2 start.

Check the status pm2 ls.

Your Nuxt.js application is now serving!

Further Information

This solution guarantees no downtime for your application on this server. (You should also prevent server failure through redundancy or high availability cloud solutions.)

You can find PM2 additional configurations here.