Adding Vite to Your Existing Web App
Vite (pronounced “veet”) is a newish JavaScript bundler. It comes batteries-included, requires almost no configuration to be useful, and includes plenty of configuration options. Oh—and it’s fast. Incredibly fast.
This post will walk through the process of converting an existing project to Vite. We’ll cover things like aliases, shimming webpack’s dotenv handling, and server proxying. In other words, we’re looking at how to move a project from its existing bundler to Vite. If you’re looking instead to start a fresh project, you’ll want to jump to their documentation.
Long story, short: the CLI will ask for your framework of choice—React, Preact, Svelte, Vue, Vanilla, or even lit-html—and whether you want TypeScript, then give you a fully functioning project.
Scaffold first! If you are interested in learning about integrating Vite into a legacy project, I’d still recommend scaffolding an empty project and poking around it a bit. At times, I’ll be pasting some clumps of code, but most of that comes straight from the default Vite template.
