Introduction

    Each page generated by VuePress has its own pre-rendered static HTML, providing great loading performance and is SEO-friendly. Yet, once the page is loaded, Vue takes over the static content and turns it into a full Single-Page Application (SPA). Extra pages are fetched on demand as the user navigates around the site.

    A VuePress site is in fact a SPA powered by Vue, and webpack. If you’ve used Vue before, you will notice the familiar development experience when you are writing or developing custom themes (you can even use Vue DevTools to debug your custom theme!).

    During the build, we create a server-rendered version of the app and render the corresponding HTML by virtually visiting each route. This approach is inspired by 's command and other projects like Gatsby.

    Each Markdown file is compiled into HTML with and then processed as the template of a Vue component. This allows you to directly use Vue inside your Markdown files and is great when you need to embed dynamic content.

    Using Vue in Markdown

    Vue-powered custom theme system

    Default theme

    Blog theme

    Nuxt is capable of doing what VuePress does, but it’s designed for building applications. VuePress is focused on content-centric static sites and provides features tailored for technical documentation out of the box.

    Both are great projects and also Vue-powered. Except they are both fully runtime-driven and therefore not SEO-friendly. If you don’t care for SEO and don’t want to mess with installing dependencies, these are still great choices.

    Hexo has been serving the Vue docs well - in fact, we are probably still a long way to go from migrating away from it for our main site. The biggest problem is that its theming system is static and string-based - we want to take advantage of Vue for both the layout and the interactivity. Also, Hexo’s Markdown rendering isn’t the most flexible to configure.

    We’ve been using GitBook for most of our sub project docs. The primary problem with GitBook is that its development reload performance is intolerable with a large amount of files. The default theme also has a pretty limiting navigation structure, and the theming system is, again, not Vue based. The team behind GitBook is also more focused on turning it into a commercial product rather than an open-source tool.