Migrating your React app from Webpack to Vite

What is Vite?

Vite is a "next generation front-end tooling", as its maintainers claim. Instant dev server, fast Hot Module Reload, easy configuration, optimized production builds - it's all there.

But… Vite's documentation doesn't say how to migrate your existing Webpack app 🤷 Worry not! In this guide, we'll get through this together!

Change your repo to ES modules

In your package.json, add the following entry:

  "type": "module",

Embrace modernity! Reject tradition! That's why we're switching to Vite anyway!

Install Vite and its plugins

npm i --save-dev vite @vitejs/plugin-react vite-plugin-html

yarn add vite @vitejs/plugin-react vite-plugin-html --dev

Replace scripts

In your package.json, you'll probably have scripts similar to these:

  "build": "NODE_ENV=production webpack",
  "dev": "NODE_ENV=development webpack serve",

build command, invoked by npm run build or yarn build, builds your app for production. dev command starts a development server.

These scripts needs to be replaced with:

  "build": "vite build",
  "dev": "vite serve",

On top of that, you can add one extra command:

  "preview": "vite preview"

preview command will start a server running your app built for production.

Let's run the development server!

  vite v2.9.1 dev server running at:

  > Local: http://localhost:3000/
  > Network: use --host to expose

  ready in 261ms.

👁👄👁 Wow, that is fast.

Teach Vite where the root is

If you started the development server now, Vite will look for index.html in your project's root directory. If it's anywhere else, Vite will not be able to find it and will display an empty page instead.

To fix this, you need to either move index.html to your root directory, or specify a different root directory for Vite to look for index.html in. In my case, it's located at src/index.html.

You can do this by adding root directory path to your commands, like this:

  "build": "vite build src",
  "dev": "vite serve src",

However, you can also do this by creating a vite.config.js file in your project root. You will need it in a short while anyway, so why not create one now to keep all the configuration in one place?

import { defineConfig } from 'vite';

export default defineConfig({
  root: 'src',
  build: {
    // Relative to the root
    outDir: '../dist',
  },
});

Configure vite-plugin-html

Now that Vite knows where to find your index.html file, it will try and parse it.

You may encounter an error like me:

How to deal with it? I was using HtmlWebpackPlugin's templateParameters option to dynamically inject custom title and other info into index.html file, like so:

  <title><%= title %></title>

new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
  template: 'index.html',
  templateParameters: {
    title: env === 'production' ? 'My site' : `My site [${env.toUpperCase()}]`,
  },
}),

Thankfully, we can do the same with vite-plugin-html. In your vite.config.js, add the following bits:

import { createHtmlPlugin } from 'vite-plugin-html';

export default defineConfig({
  // …
  plugins: [
    createHtmlPlugin({
      inject: {
        data: {
          title: env === 'production' ? 'My site' : `My site [${env.toUpperCase()}]`,
        },
      },
    }),
  ],
});

Add entry module to your index.html file

At this point, your index.html file should be served just fine. But the app still won't load!

If you used Webpack, you probably have also used html-webpack-plugin to handle injecting <script> tag(s) with your entry module(s) to index.html.

Vite will not inject these tags automatically. You will need to add them by yourself. For example:

<script type="module" src="./index.jsx"></script>

Aaah, that's better. Something came to life.

Configure @vitejs/plugin-react

Okay, as you can see, we're not quite there yet. We need to configure @vitejs/plugin-react to make it work with React.

If you still used classic JSX runtime, your app may already load at this point, but you'll want to follow these steps anyway. This plugin will not only handle automatic JSX runtime (the one thanks to which you don't need to manually import React in every file), but also add features like Fast Refresh, enable Babel integration, and much, much more.

Add it to your vite.config.js file like so:

import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react';

export default defineConfig({
  // …
  plugins: [
    // …
    react({
      // Use React plugin in all *.jsx and *.tsx files
      include: '**/*.{jsx,tsx}',
    }),
  ],
});

Babel plugins

You might not need Babel at all, as @babel/preset-env and @babel/preset-react are of no use.

But sometimes Babel plugins may still come in handy. For example, there's a plugin to remove PropTypes you can use to make bundle size a bit smaller, and there's a dedicated plugin for styled-components that makes development and testing easier by, among others, adding component display names.

@vitejs/plugin-react will come to the rescue here, with babel option. For example, to add babel-plugin-styled-components plugin:

    react({
      // …
      babel: {
        plugins: ['babel-plugin-styled-components'],
      },
    },

Static files handling

By default, files from public directory placed in your root directory are going to be copied over at build time. If you have these files elsewhere, you can use publicDir option like so:

export default defineConfig({
  // …
  publicDir: '../public',
});

The process.env.* problem

I was using process.env.NODE_ENV in a bunch of places in my app. This resulted in the following error being thrown in the console:

Uncaught ReferenceError: process is not defined

In Vite, you can use import.meta.env.* instead. For example, process.env.NODE_ENV can be replaced with import.meta.env.NODE_ENV.

Enjoy!

Now you should see your app, powered by Vite!

We're not done yet; we'll still need to tweak a few things before running it in production. For this, you'll have to wait for the second part of this guide. Subscribe to get notified!

Cleaning up

You can safely remove these dependencies, which are now unused:

• webpack (duh)
• webpack-cli
• webpack-dev-server
• *-loader (e.g. babel-loader, style-loader)
• *-webpack-plugin (e.g. html-webpack-plugin, mini-css-extract-plugin
• @babel/preset-env
• @babel/preset-react

webpack.config.js Webpack config file can also be deleted.

babel.config.js, babel.config.json, or .babelrc can be deleted, provided that you didn't use it as your Babel config in @vitejs/plugin-react configuration.

Anything missing?

Do you think there's anything else that needs to be addressed, that may be a common problem when migrating from Webpack to Vite? Please, please let me know in the comments!