What’s new in Vite 2.0

Vite is a frontend build tool originally developed for Vue.js, now supporting a wide range of frameworks like React, Preact, and vanilla JavaScript, through its platform-agnostic templates. Utilizing Rollup.js for bundling and leveraging esbuild for faster build times, Vite 2.0 features a redesigned architecture, an enhanced plugin system, first-class CSS support, and experimental SSR capabilities. Released on February 16, 2021, Vite 2.0 improves the developer experience by providing a high-quality, framework-agnostic tooling setup that facilitates fast development with native ESM support, hot module replacement, and a simplified dev server configuration. The new plugin system builds on Rollup's capabilities while offering Vite-specific operations, and the tool's adoption of esbuild for pre-bundling dependencies results in significant performance gains. Vite's improved CSS handling includes features like CSS splitting and URL re-basing, and its SSR support, although still experimental, aims to streamline server-side rendering processes for frameworks like Vue 3 and React.js.