Nuxt v3: How does one access the package.json variables?

With Nuxt v2 you could access the process environment variables using process.env.npm_package_name, for example. You still can in Nuxt v3, but it has to be wrapped in a publicRuntimeConfig().

This is how I have gone about it:

package.json

{
  "name": "nuxt-example-app",
  "displayName": "Nuxt v3 Example App",
  "version": "0.0.1",
  "description": "This is an app primarily to showcase my skills with Nuxt, and other web orientated implementations.",
  .
  .
  .
}

nuxt.config.ts

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  publicRuntimeConfig: {
    NPM_PACKAGE_NAME: process.env.npm_package_name,
    NPM_PACKAGE_DESCRIPTION: process.env.npm_package_description
  },
  .
  .
  .
});

app.vue

<script setup lang="ts">
const config = useRuntimeConfig();
useHead({
  title: config.NPM_PACKAGE_NAME || '',
  meta: [
    { name: 'description', content: config.NPM_PACKAGE_DESCRIPTION || '' }
  ]
});
</script>

config.NPM_PACKAGE_NAME is defined, but config.NPM_PACKAGE_DESCRIPTION is not. process.env.npm_package_description worked in Nuxt v2, why not now?

The NPM documentation states:

The package.json fields are tacked onto the npm_package_ prefix. So, for instance, if you had {"name":"foo", "version":"1.2.5"} in your package.json file, then your package scripts would have the npm_package_name environment variable set to "foo", and the npm_package_version set to "1.2.5". You can access these variables in your code with process.env.npm_package_name and process.env.npm_package_version, and so on for other fields.

(source)

Running process.env on the debug console does not even show npm_package_name in the object, let alone npm_package_description.

Not an answer, but an alternative solution that Estus Flask has pointed out, is you can just import the package.json into nuxt.config.ts.

nuxt.config.ts

import packageJSON from './package.json';

export default defineNuxtConfig({
  app: {
    head: {
      title: packageJSON.name || '',
      charset: 'utf-8',
      viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1',
      meta: [
        { name: 'description', content: packageJSON.description || '' }
      ]
    }
  },
  .
  .
  .
});

You can also destructure it to only the key values you need:

import { name, description } from './package.json';