Deploying a Vite Project with Assets

1. Introduction

This tutorial aims to guide you through the process of deploying a Vite project to the web while ensuring all your project assets are correctly included and load as expected once the site goes live.

By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to:

• Understand the process and importance of deploying a Vite project with assets
• Deploy a Vite project with assets successfully

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge of web development (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)
• Understanding of Vite
• A Vite project ready for deployment

2. Step-by-Step Guide

Deploying a Vite project involves building the project, preparing the assets, and then deploying the project to a server.

Building the Vite Project

Before deploying, we need to build our Vite project. Building transforms our source code into production-ready code. Run the following command in your project directory:

npm run build

This will create a dist folder which contains all our project's build assets, ready for deployment.

Preparing the assets

Vite already handles the inclusion of assets in the build process. However, to ensure all assets load correctly, confirm that Vite's base config option in vite.config.js matches the public path of your deployed project:

export default {
  base: '/path/to/your/project/'
}

Deploying the Vite Project

After preparing the assets, you can now deploy your project to your preferred hosting platform. This step varies depending on the platform. Most of them require you to upload the dist directory.

3. Code Examples

Here is an example of a vite.config.js file:

// vite.config.js
export default {
  base: '/my-vite-project/',
  // other configurations...
}

The base config option should match the public path of your deployed project. If your site will be deployed at https://www.example.com/my-vite-project/, then the base option should be /my-vite-project/.

4. Summary

In this tutorial, we've:

• Built our Vite project for production
• Prepared our assets for deployment
• Deployed our Vite project

The next steps could be learning about optimizing your Vite project, using plugins, and exploring advanced Vite configurations.

For additional resources, refer to the official Vite documentation.

5. Practice Exercises

1. Exercise 1: Try deploying a simple Vite project to a free hosting platform like Netlify or Vercel. Make sure the project includes images or other assets.
2. Exercise 2: Experiment with changing the base configuration in vite.config.js and observe the effect on asset loading in your deployed project.

Solutions:

1. Every hosting platform has different steps for deployment, but generally, you'll need to upload the dist directory and configure the deploy settings.
2. Changing the base config option will affect where the browser tries to load your assets from. If it doesn't match your project's public path, your assets will not load correctly.

Tips for further practice

Practice deploying more complex projects and explore more features of Vite. Try using Vite with different frameworks like React, Vue, or Svelte.