Discovering Vite

As a frontend software engineer at SBIP, I use a lot of React at work. One thing new that I found recently and started using for frontend work at SBIP is something called Vite which I am excited about sharing with you in this article.

Frontend developers would probably be familiar with create-react-app (CRA) - it has over 90k stars on github and is widely utilised for starter projects / guides. I also started out using CRA but I was looking for an alternative when a critical dependency required webpack 5 which CRA did not support. (Note: now CRA supports webpack 5.)

My search quickly led me to Vite which looked very interesting. It is relatively new, promises to be blazing fast in development and has a great team behind it (including Vue creator Evan You).

When I found out that Vite has a template for React applications (see https://vitejs.dev/guide/#scaffolding-your-first-vite-project), I decided to try it out - why not right? And it turns out that Vite works beautifully for my use case. The dependency that couldn’t work on CRA worked on Vite and I am very impressed with Vite’s speed.

Should you give Vite a try? My answer is a definite yes! Because developing on Vite using their React template feels no different from developing on CRA. And Vite comes with benefits like incredible speed. To find out more about Vite, you can visit https://vitejs.dev/.