GSAP & Plugins in Nuxt

A skeleton repo to help setup GSAP's plugins in Nuxt

This example repo follows the manual installation steps from Nuxt's documentation with the 'static' mode as the target output for the sake of simplicity.

Start Nuxt dev server

In your command-line terminal of choice, assuming you have followed the steps for the Manual installation, start your local sever with the following command.

# Using NPM
# serve with hot reload at localhost:3000
$ npm run dev

or

# Using Yarn
# serve with hot reload at localhost:3000
$ yarn dev

Adding GSAP and its plugins

Firstly it is worth mentioning that you don't have to add GSAP and many of its plugins to your application's bundle. It works just fine being pulled from a CDN, and it will probably already be cached in your visitor's browser due to GSAP's prevalence on the internet.

In its current form, GSAP is designed to work as a global object attached to the window. If you can have GSAP as an external script tag, it is recommended that you do so.

GSAP as a global dependency

List the CDN urls in your nuxt.config.js file like the following:

export default {
  head: {
    script: [
      {
        // 90% Of your needs will be covered by TweenMax
        src: 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gsap/3.5.1/gsap.min.js'
      },
      {
        // Non-premium plugins will all be available via CDN
        src: 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gsap/3.5.1/Draggable.min.js'
      },
    ]
  }
}

See Nuxt's documentation on adding global settings to your application.

All is now set and you can use GSAP in any of your components.

GSAP's premium plugins as globals

GSAP's premium plugins are not available via CDN links. They are available to Club GreenSock members under the 'Downloads' section of their account profiles (if you are not a club member, you can get more information on this page).

To add members-only plugins to your Nuxt project, download them from your profile page, add the chosen plugins into Nuxt's static folder and add a reference on the script section of nuxt.config.js file.

Nuxt documentation on static assets.

export default {
  head: {
    script: [
      {
        src: 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gsap/3.5.1/gsap.min.js'
      },
      {
        src: 'https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/gsap/3.5.1/Draggable.min.js'
      },
      // Member-only plugins that exists in the ./static folder (NOT present in this repository)
      {
        src: '/ThrowPropsPlugin.min.js'
      },
      {
        src: '/GSDevTools.min.js'
      },
      {
        src: '/SplitText.min.js'
      },
    ]
  }
}

GSAP in your project bundle

Install GSAP as a dependency of your project using NPM or Yarn.

# Using NPM
npm install gsap

# Using Yarn
yarn add gsap

import GSAP and its plugins in the relevant component.

<script>
import { gsap } from "gsap"
import { Draggable } from 'gsap/Draggable.js'

export default {
  mounted: function () {
    // Be sure to register any plugins that are imported
    
    gsap.registerPlugin(Draggable)
  }
}
</script>

That is it. GSAP is ready to be used anywhere it is imported.

More detailed information on GSAP's NPM usage can be found in the official documentation.

Bundling premium plugins

Because of licensing, GSAP's premium plugins are not openly available via NPM. Please refer to the official documentation for up-to-date instructions on how to add them to your project.

Caveat: Server-side rendering (SSR)

While some plugins work straight out of the box with Nuxt's default SSR setup, others do not.

This has to do with the intricacies of Node servers, the lack of the window object amongst other things I will not pretent to know about.

In order to compile correctly, Nuxt needs to know it has to trasnpile GSAP into a format the Node server can work with. In your nuxt.config.js add a transpile property to the build object.

export default {
  ...
  build: {
    ...
    transpile: ['gsap']
  }
}

You might also have to check if the code is being run in the client-side before registering a plugin.

if(process.client) {
  gsap.registerPlugin(Draggable)
}

See Nuxt's documentation on the transpile option and checking if the window object is available on the matter.