Hi! We're really excited that you're interested in contributing to Vite! Before submitting your contribution, please read through the following guide.
The Vite repo is a monorepo using pnpm workspaces. The package manager used to install and link dependencies must be pnpm.
To develop and test the core vite
package:
-
Run
pnpm i
in Vite's root folder. -
Run
pnpm run build
in Vite's root folder. -
If you are developing Vite itself, you can go to
packages/vite
and runpnpm run dev
to automatically rebuild Vite whenever you change its code.
You can alternatively use Vite.js Docker Dev for a containerized Docker setup for Vite.js development.
Vite uses pnpm v7. If you are working on multiple projects with different versions of pnpm, it's recommended to enable Corepack by running
corepack enable
.
To use breakpoints and explore code execution, you can use the "Run and Debug" feature from VS Code.
-
Add a
debugger
statement where you want to stop the code execution. -
Click the "Run and Debug" icon in the activity bar of the editor, which opens the Run and Debug view.
-
Click the "JavaScript Debug Terminal" button in the Run and Debug view, which opens a terminal in VS Code.
-
From that terminal, go to
playground/xxx
, and runpnpm run dev
. -
The execution will stop at the
debugger
statement, and you can use the Debug toolbar to continue, step over, and restart the process...
Some errors are masked and hidden away because of the layers of abstraction and sandboxed nature added by Vitest, Playwright, and Chromium. In order to see what's actually going wrong and the contents of the devtools console in those instances, follow this setup:
-
Add a
debugger
statement to theplayground/vitestSetup.ts
->afterAll
hook. This will pause execution before the tests quit and the Playwright browser instance exits. -
Run the tests with the
debug-serve
script command, which will enable remote debugging:pnpm run debug-serve resolve
. -
Wait for inspector devtools to open in your browser and the debugger to attach.
-
In the sources panel in the right column, click the play button to resume execution, and allow the tests to run, which will open a Chromium instance.
-
Focusing the Chromium instance, you can open the browser devtools and inspect the console there to find the underlying problems.
-
To close everything, just stop the test process back in your terminal.
You may wish to test your locally modified copy of Vite against another package that is built with Vite. For pnpm, after building Vite, you can use pnpm.overrides
to do this. Note that pnpm.overrides
must be specified in the root package.json
, and you must list the package as a dependency in the root package.json
:
{
"dependencies": {
"vite": "^2.0.0"
},
"pnpm": {
"overrides": {
"vite": "link:../path/to/vite/packages/vite"
}
}
}
And re-run pnpm install
to link the package.
Each package under playground/
contains a __tests__
directory. The tests are run using Vitest + Playwright with custom integrations to make writing tests simple. The detailed setup is inside vitest.config.e2e.js
and playground/vitest*
files.
Before running the tests, make sure that Vite has been built. On Windows, you may want to activate Developer Mode to resolve issues with symlink creation for non-admins. Also, you may want to set git core.symlinks
to true
to resolve issues with symlinks in git.
Each integration test can be run under either dev server mode or build mode.
-
pnpm test
by default runs every integration test in both serve and build mode, and also unit tests. -
pnpm run test-serve
runs tests only under serve mode. -
pnpm run test-build
runs tests only under build mode. -
pnpm run test-serve [match]
orpnpm run test-build [match]
runs tests in specific packages that match the given filter. e.g.pnpm run test-serve asset
runs tests for bothplayground/asset
andvite/src/node/__tests__/asset
under serve mode.Note package matching is not available for the
pnpm test
script, which always runs all tests.
Other than tests under playground/
for integration tests, packages might contain unit tests under their __tests__
directory. Unit tests are powered by Vitest. The detailed config is inside vitest.config.ts
files.
-
pnpm run test-unit
runs unit tests under each package. -
pnpm run test-unit [match]
runs tests in specific packages that match the given filter.
Inside playground tests, you can import the page
object from ~utils
, which is a Playwright Page
instance that has already navigated to the served page of the current playground. So, writing a test is as simple as:
import { page } from '~utils'
test('should work', async () => {
expect(await page.textContent('.foo')).toMatch('foo')
})
Some common test helpers (e.g. testDir
, isBuild
, or editFile
) are also available in the utils. Source code is located at playground/test-utils.ts
.
Note: The test build environment uses a different default set of Vite config to skip transpilation during tests to make it faster. This may produce a different result compared to the default production build.
To add new tests, you should find a related playground to the fix or feature (or create a new one). As an example, static assets loading is tested in the assets playground. In this Vite app, there is a test for ?raw
imports with a section defined in the index.html
for it:
<h2>?raw import</h2>
<code class="raw"></code>
This will be modified with the result of a file import:
import rawSvg from './nested/fragment.svg?raw'
text('.raw', rawSvg)
...where the text
util is defined as:
function text(el, text) {
document.querySelector(el).textContent = text
}
In the spec tests, the modifications to the DOM listed above are used to test this feature:
test('?raw import', async () => {
expect(await page.textContent('.raw')).toMatch('SVG')
})
In many test cases, we need to mock dependencies using link:
and file:
protocols. pnpm
treats link:
as symlinks and file:
as hardlinks. To test dependencies as if they were copied into node_modules
, use the file:
protocol. Otherwise, use the link:
protocol.
You can set the DEBUG
environment variable to turn on debugging logs (e.g. DEBUG="vite:resolve"
). To see all debug logs, you can set DEBUG="vite:*"
, but be warned that it will be quite noisy. You can run grep -r "createDebugger('vite:" packages/vite/src/
to see a list of available debug scopes.
-
Checkout a topic branch from a base branch (e.g.
main
), and merge back against that branch. -
If adding a new feature:
- Add accompanying test case.
- Provide a convincing reason to add this feature. Ideally, you should open a suggestion issue first, and have it approved before working on it.
-
If fixing a bug:
- If you are resolving a special issue, add
(fix #xxxx[,#xxxx])
(#xxxx is the issue id) in your PR title for a better release log (e.g.fix: update entities encoding/decoding (fix #3899)
). - Provide a detailed description of the bug in the PR. Live demo preferred.
- Add appropriate test coverage if applicable.
- If you are resolving a special issue, add
-
It's OK to have multiple small commits as you work on the PR. GitHub can automatically squash them before merging.
-
Make sure tests pass!
-
Commit messages must follow the commit message convention so that changelogs can be automatically generated. Commit messages are automatically validated before commit (by invoking Git Hooks via simple-git-hooks).
-
No need to worry about code style as long as you have installed the dev dependencies. Modified files are automatically formatted with Prettier on commit (by invoking Git Hooks via simple-git-hooks).
The following section is mostly for maintainers who have commit access, but it's helpful to go through if you intend to make non-trivial contributions to the codebase.
Vite aims to be lightweight, and this includes being aware of the number of npm dependencies and their size.
We use Rollup to pre-bundle most dependencies before publishing! Therefore, most dependencies, even those used in runtime source code, should be added under devDependencies
by default. This also creates the following constraints that we need to be aware of in the codebase.
In some cases, we intentionally lazy-require some dependencies to improve start-up performance. However, note that we cannot use simple require('somedep')
calls since these are ignored in ESM files, so the dependency won't be included in the bundle, and the actual dependency won't even be there when published since they are in devDependencies
.
Instead, use (await import('somedep')).default
.
Most deps should be added to devDependencies
even if they are needed at runtime. Some exceptions are:
- Type packages. Example:
@types/*
. - Deps that cannot be properly bundled due to binary files. Example:
esbuild
. - Deps that ship their own types that are used in Vite's own public types. Example:
rollup
.
Avoid deps with large transitive dependencies that result in bloated size compared to the functionality it provides. For example, http-proxy
itself plus @types/http-proxy
is a little over 1MB in size, but http-proxy-middleware
pulls in a ton of dependencies that make it 7MB(!) when a minimal custom middleware on top of http-proxy
only requires a couple of lines of code.
Vite aims to be fully usable as a dependency in a TypeScript project (e.g. it should provide proper typings for VitePress), and also in vite.config.ts
. This means technically a dependency whose types are exposed needs to be part of dependencies
instead of devDependencies
. However, this also means we won't be able to bundle it.
To get around this, we inline some of these dependencies' types in packages/vite/src/types
. This way, we can still expose the typing but bundle the dependency's source code.
Use pnpm run check-dist-types
to check that the bundled types do not rely on types in devDependencies
. If you are adding dependencies
, make sure to configure tsconfig.check.json
.
For types shared between client and node, they should be added into packages/vite/types
. These types are not bundled and are published as is (though they are still considered internal). Dependency types within this directory (e.g. packages/vite/types/chokidar.d.ts
) are deprecated and should be added to packages/vite/src/types
instead.
We already have many config options, and we should avoid fixing an issue by adding yet another one. Before adding an option, consider whether the problem:
- is really worth addressing
- can be fixed with a smarter default
- has workaround using existing options
- can be addressed with a plugin instead
To add a new language to the Vite docs, see vite-docs-template
.