How Use and Deploy Vite With React

In this article, we will look at how to make a simple project using Vite and React. As a bonus, I will show you how to deploy our project.

First, let’s create a folder for our project and start creating a project using Vite and its templates.

mkdir ViteProject
cd ViteProject
npm create vite@latest

Vite will prompt us to choose the name of our project, the template under which it will make it, and the compiler with which it will work. For our example, I chose the following options:

That’s all, our project is created! 

Let’s study the structure of the created project:

• node_modules – respectively modules used in our project 
• public – directory with media files we use 
• src – directory with the project code, where we will add our code and components 
• .gitignore – file to describe ignored files for git
• index.html – HTML file where our React application is mounted 
• package-lock.json – a file for describing installed dependencies 
• package.json – a file for describing the project and dependencies, script commands and other things vite.config.json – default vite config file

Let’s run our project and see what we have now. 

Run the command in the terminal

npm run dev

In the terminal, we will see

In this image, we are told how much Vite has collected for our project and at what address we can open it.

 After opening the address http://localhost:5173/ we will see the standard Vite template for React, namely:

Yeah! our project is created and launched and we can further develop it!

Let’s take a look at the Vite configuration and see how it’s done.

import { defineConfig } from 'vite'
import react from '@vitejs/plugin-react'
// https://vitejs.dev/config/
export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [react()],
})

We see that it is quite simple, and does not look like a similar webpack configuration. In this case, the Vite plugin for React is used, which uses esbuild and babel. You can read more detailed information about this plugin on the page of this plugin.

Support for Sass and Tailwind

With Vite, we can easily use Sass and Tailwind as they are supported out of the box!

I renamed the App.css file to App.scss and added an inline style for the h1.

But so far, after rebooting, we get this error

This is because we didn’t install sass in our dependencies. 

We need to execute this command

npm install sass --save-dev

And after that, we see that the style has been applied to our h1 tag!

As for Tailwind, we also need to go through only the installation of Tailwind itself, namely:

• instal tailwind css – npm install -D tailwindcss postcss autoprefixernpxtailwindcss init -p
•  Configure your template paths – in file tailwind.config.cjs

/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */
module.exports = {
  content: [
    "./index.html",
    "./src/**/*.{js,ts,jsx,tsx}",
  ],
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
}

• Add in index.css tailwind directives 

That’s all you need to use Tailwind!

Deploy

In order to deploy our site, you first need to build it. 

This is done with the command

npm run build

The result of the Vite build is added to the dist directory

For subsequent testing of the built site, we can use the command

npm run preview

For deployment, we need to install Vercel CLI

npm i -g vercel

and run command

vercel

You will be asked to log in and asked a series of questions about your project and that’s it!

Our project – Vite React Vercel App

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to say that in this article we have analyzed a simple way to create a project, its configuration and deployment. This is just an overview article on the topic. Hope it helps you and teaches you something!