This is my implementation of Vite with PHP.

making use of Vite in a Wordpress theme is as easy as:

echo new Vite(
  'main.js', 
  WP_DEBUG, 
  get_template_directory() . '/public/dist/', 
  get_template_directory_uri() . '/public/dist/'
);

Vite is amazing. Credits go to Evan You @yyx990803 and the Vue team.

Goal

• Handle the cleanest way possible;

Status

• Works gracefully!

Note about the development host

A characteristic of this setup is that you'll run your project from your own local server, for exemple http://vite-php-setup.test. Vite will be running at http://localhost:3000 where our script and styles will be served from, but accesing http://localhost:3000 directly will be empty, which is fine.

Of course, HMR and styles will work just fine! And fast!

• Mininum Node.js version >=12.0.0

Notes about our example code

• The "public" folder is the web server's public root, "public/index.php" is the front controller or bootstrap file;
• The "vite" folder is outside of public root intentionaly, where it would actually be within a PHP app;
• For the sake of this example, we are not setting up a SPA, instead we have multiple Vue components sprinkled throughout your page, simulating the mix of regular HTML with interactive elements (using in-DOM HTML as the template);

Known issue 1 (during Dev only)

A limitation is Vite's port during development, PHP helpers must match the one that was created during "npm run dev" (default 3000). For example, if the port 3000 is in use, Vite will try the next one (3001 and so on), so our helper PHP wouldn't know about that.

The solution is to stricly specify which port to use, and match the PHP side to the same port. Check vite.config.js for example.

Known issue 2 (during Dev only)

Image urls within CSS works fine BUT you need to create a symlink on dev server to map to your assets folder. This is an expected limitation as noted on Vite docs

The solution is here, adjust the paths and run in terminal:

ln -s {path_to_vite}/src/assets {path_to_public_html}/assets

Another solution would be importing assets in script tag which will consider the server.origin config to generate absolute urls:

import logoUrl from '../assets/logo.png'

Tips for multiple entries

You may find the need to handle multiple entries, for example, one js/css for the backend and another js/css for frontend. For that, it depends directly on how you want to organize your code.

So you can have:

• A single Vite multi-page setup.
• A shared Vite setup, but outputing different entries in separated build steps, example here.