How to access vue instance in Vuex

Vue 2 and Vuex 3 answer

In the store you can access the vue instance by accessing this._vm

const store = new Vuex.Store({
  mutations: {
    test(state) {
      console.log(this._vm);
    }
  }
});

I'm using Vue 3 and Vue.prototype.$foo seems to have been removed for this version. I also found that in my version of VueX there is no this._vm.

I explored the Provide / Inject method which is recommended by the Vue 3 docs. This worked nicely for accessing globals from within my components, but I couldn't access them from within store.

The solution I went for was to use globalProperties on the Vue object and standard properties on store, and set them just before mounting the app.

main.js:

import store from './store/index';
import App from './App.vue';

// Load custom globals
import conf from '@/inc/myapp.config';

const app = createApp(App)
  .use(store);

// Register globals in app and store
app.config.globalProperties.$conf = conf;
store.$conf = conf;

app.mount('#app');

What I like about this is that I can access the globals in the same way in both store and components.

In a component:

export default {
  data() {
    return {
    };
  },
  created() {
    console.log( this.$conf.API_URL );
  },
}

...and you can access this.$conf.API_URL in the same way from actions, mutations and getters.

Once I'd found this solution I no longer needed access to the whole Vue instance from within store, but if you need it for some reason you can assign store.$app = app; in the same place in main.js.

You have 2 approaches:

1. Pass down the property (or even access the _vm property from inside Vuex) as an argument from a component

   methods: {
     this.$store.dispatch('someAction', this.$API)
   }
   

2. Declare and export that same variable from another file and consume it from your main.js AND your Vuex file:

   // api.js
   export const API = "http://localhost:5000/api"
   

   // main.js
   import { API } from './api.js
   ...
   Vue.prototype.$API = API
   

   // store.js
   import { API } from './api.js
   
   // you can use API now!
   

Although I would personally lean towards the second, I would not store the API path in Vue at all as I'd rather have the api.js file as a service to perform all ajax calls and consume that file from where I need.

use this._vm

here is why

by default when you access this in vuex store it will point store so it will output something like this

so after that, you see that there is something called _vm in store here it is

so that _vm points to the vue component so to access it you will need to use this._vue

you can better create a getter of the vue instance like

const store = new Vuex.Store({
  getters: {
    vue(state) {
      return this._vm
    }
  }
});

//so you can use it across your store
store.getters.vue

//Note
//the above way of accessing getter works on non `namespaced` stores 

As of recently, under Vuex 4.* and Vue 3.*, this.$app hasn't been defined for the store object. Instead you have Vue Router defined as this.$router.

So for javascript, the way to get app in store would be like so:

The code would now be: router.app = app; and inside, say, an action: let app = this.$router.app;