vite

Vite is a frontend build tool aimed at making development of modern web projects faster and leaner. The name is the French word for "quick" and is pronounced like "veet". It is split into two major parts that work together: a development server and a build command.

The development server uses native ES modules — the module system already built into modern browsers — to skip a lot of the bundling work that traditional tools do up front. That gives near-instant server startup and a feature called Hot Module Replacement, which updates code in your running app the moment you save a file, without a full page reload. Vite layers extra capabilities on top of native modules, so during development you still get rich features rather than a stripped-down experience.

The build command takes the same project and bundles it with Rolldown, a bundler pre-configured by Vite to produce highly optimized static assets suitable for production deployment. The result is one tool you use both while coding and when shipping the final site.

Beyond the core, Vite exposes a Plugin API and a JavaScript API, both fully typed, so other tools and frameworks can extend it or drive it programmatically. The repository is a monorepo containing the main vite package, a plugin-legacy package, and a create-vite scaffold for starting new projects from a template.

Someone would actually use Vite when building a frontend application or library and wanting fast feedback during development plus an optimized production build, without assembling a custom toolchain. The project is written in TypeScript, distributed as npm packages on Node.js, and licensed under MIT.