Adding Fathom Analytics to a Nuxt Project

If, like me, you have started using Fathom Analytics (Affiliate link) you might be wondering how to add it to your Nuxt project properly.

The official Fathom docs (at the time of writing this article) involves overwriting the app.html file — this can cause issues with deployment and updating your application. Instead, we are going to utilise the Vue Meta package to add a script tag to the site.

By default, Vue Meta comes preinstalled when you create a Nuxt application

Open up your nuxt.config.js file in your favourite code editor. Look for the section starting with head. It might look a little like this if you haven't made any previous changes.

export default {
  // escaped for brevity

  head: {
    meta: [
      { charset: 'utf-8' },
      { name: 'viewport', content: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1' },

      // hid is used as unique identifier. Do not use `vmid` for it as it will not work
      { hid: 'description', name: 'description', content: 'Meta description' }
    ]
  }

  // escaped for brevity
}

Let us update the nuxt.config.js file to include the script. We're also going to set some healthy defaults to ensure that we only load the script once and only on the production server.

export default {
  // escaped for brevity

  head: {
    script: [
      {
        hid: 'fathom', // unique identifier
        src: SITE_URL,
        site: SITE_ID,
        spa: 'auto', // set by fathom
        defer: 'defer',
        once: true, // only load once on SSR

        // optional: skip loading script if we aren't in production
        skip: process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production'
      }
    ]
  }

  // escaped for brevity
}

Grab your Site ID and Script URL from the Fathom Dashboard and replace the SITE_URL and SITE_ID variables in the code you just added.

Save your config and deploy the changes then watch the traffic coming in.

Note: If you want to test everything works you can set skip to false and you should see the traffic hit your dashboard (note, this can mess up your analytics so potentially test it on a temporary site).

That's everything - enjoy!