If you’ve worked with Webpack before, you probably remember how much setup it needed — loaders, plugins, split chunks, environment variables, and more. Then came Vite, and suddenly the dev experience felt instant. But have you ever wondered why it feels faster and what exactly it does for you behind the scenes?
Let’s break it down 👇
🚀 What Is Vite?
Vite (pronounced veet, meaning “fast” in French) is a next-gen frontend build tool created by Evan You (the creator of Vue). It replaces the traditional bundle-first approach of Webpack with native ES Modules in the browser during development and Rollup under the hood for production builds.
So, instead of waiting for the entire app to bundle before you can see changes, Vite serves your source files direc…
If you’ve worked with Webpack before, you probably remember how much setup it needed — loaders, plugins, split chunks, environment variables, and more. Then came Vite, and suddenly the dev experience felt instant. But have you ever wondered why it feels faster and what exactly it does for you behind the scenes?
Let’s break it down 👇
🚀 What Is Vite?
Vite (pronounced veet, meaning “fast” in French) is a next-gen frontend build tool created by Evan You (the creator of Vue). It replaces the traditional bundle-first approach of Webpack with native ES Modules in the browser during development and Rollup under the hood for production builds.
So, instead of waiting for the entire app to bundle before you can see changes, Vite serves your source files directly — compiling and transforming them on demand.
TL;DR:
- Dev mode: lightning-fast startup using ES Modules and on-demand transformation
- Prod build: uses Rollup for optimized bundling
- Extensible: via plugins (supports Rollup and Vite-specific ones)
🧱 What We Used to Configure Manually in Webpack
If you’ve ever set up Webpack from scratch, you know the list is long. Let’s look at some of the things you had to configure manually before — and how Vite handles them out of the box.
| Concern | In Webpack | In Vite |
|---|---|---|
| JS/TS Compilation | Use babel-loader or ts-loader | Handled by esbuild (10–100× faster) |
| CSS & Preprocessors | Configure style-loader, css-loader, sass-loader | Built-in support for CSS, PostCSS, Sass, Less, Stylus |
| Static Assets (images, fonts, etc.) | Use file-loader or url-loader | Automatically handled — imported files return URLs, small ones get inlined |
| Environment Variables | Use dotenv + dotenv-webpack | .env files supported out of the box (import.meta.env) |
| Hot Module Replacement (HMR) | Requires webpack-dev-server + configuration | Built-in HMR, instant updates |
| Code Splitting / Vendor Chunks | Configure SplitChunksPlugin | Automatic chunking handled by Rollup |
| Dev Server | Needs setup (webpack-dev-server) | Built-in dev server with lightning-fast reloads |
| HTML Entry Point | Requires HtmlWebpackPlugin | Vite uses plain index.html as the entry point |
No more juggling a dozen loaders or plugins just to get a working setup.
🧩 When You Still Might Need Plugins
Vite has a plugin system (based on Rollup’s) — but you’ll mostly use it for extending behavior, not for basic setup.
Examples:
- Using React, Vue, or Svelte → use official framework plugins
- Adding legacy browser support →
@vitejs/plugin-legacy - Integrating PWA or SSR → specific community plugins
Unlike Webpack, these are optional — not essential to make Vite work.
🧠 Why You Don’t Need SplitChunks Anymore
In Webpack, you had to configure SplitChunksPlugin to separate your vendor dependencies into smaller chunks.
If you didn’t, your entire node_modules could end up as one massive file — slowing down load times.
Vite (via Rollup) handles this automatically:
- Vendor dependencies are split intelligently.
- Shared code is extracted.
- Dynamic imports automatically create lazy-loaded chunks.
So in most cases, no manual chunk config is needed unless you want to fine-tune advanced scenarios using Rollup’s manualChunks option.
⚙️ Why It’s Fast — Even for Large Projects
- esbuild is written in Go → transforms JS/TS 10–100× faster than Babel.
- Native ESM dev server → loads files on demand instead of bundling everything.
- Persistent caching → pre-bundled dependencies are reused between runs.
- Optimized Rollup build → production bundles are minified and tree-shaken.
In short, Vite doesn’t just skip unnecessary work — it does the necessary work smarter.
🧭 The Future of Vite: Rolldown
Vite is planning to migrate its production bundler from Rollup to Rolldown — a new bundler written in Rust by the Rollup team. The goal? Even faster builds and more alignment between dev and prod behavior.
It’s like Rollup, but with Rust-powered performance. ⚡
💡 Final Thoughts
Vite isn’t just a “faster Webpack.” It’s a rethink of how we build for the web — leveraging modern browsers, native modules, and efficient defaults. Most of what used to require manual setup in Webpack now just works in Vite.
If you’ve ever lost hours tweaking loaders or waiting for builds, Vite feels like a breath of fresh air.
Just run npm create vite@latest, and you’re ready to go.
🏁 TL;DR Recap
✅ Out-of-the-box features:
- HMR, CSS, TS, environment variables, asset handling, code splitting ✅ No need for:
- HtmlWebpackPlugin, dotenv-webpack, file-loader, style-loader, SplitChunksPlugin ✅ Dev: native ESM, super fast ✅ Prod: optimized Rollup build