@vitejs/plugin-legacy

What is @vitejs/plugin-legacy?

@vitejs/plugin-legacy is a Vite plugin that provides support for legacy browsers by transpiling modern JavaScript syntax to ES5 and injecting polyfills for missing features. This allows developers to use modern JavaScript features while ensuring compatibility with older browsers.

What are @vitejs/plugin-legacy's main functionalities?

Transpile Modern JavaScript to ES5

This feature allows you to transpile modern JavaScript syntax to ES5, ensuring compatibility with older browsers. The 'targets' option specifies the browsers you want to support.

import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy';

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      targets: ['defaults', 'not IE 11']
    })
  ]
};

Inject Polyfills

This feature allows you to inject polyfills for missing features in older browsers. The 'polyfills' option specifies the polyfills you want to include.

import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy';

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      polyfills: ['es.promise.finally', 'es/map', 'es/set']
    })
  ]
};

Modern and Legacy Bundle

This feature allows you to create both modern and legacy bundles. The 'modernPolyfills' option ensures that modern browsers get a smaller bundle with only necessary polyfills.

import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy';

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      modernPolyfills: true
    })
  ]
};

Other packages similar to @vitejs/plugin-legacy

babel-preset-env

babel-preset-env is a Babel preset that allows you to use the latest JavaScript without needing to micromanage which syntax transforms (and optionally, browser polyfills) are needed by your target environment(s). It is similar to @vitejs/plugin-legacy in that it helps in transpiling modern JavaScript to be compatible with older browsers, but it is more general-purpose and can be used outside of Vite.

core-js

core-js is a modular standard library for JavaScript that includes polyfills for ECMAScript up to 2021, promises, symbols, collections, iterators, and many other features. It is similar to @vitejs/plugin-legacy in that it provides polyfills for missing features in older browsers, but it is a standalone library that can be used with various build tools.

polyfill-library

polyfill-library is a service that provides polyfills for web features based on the user's browser. It is similar to @vitejs/plugin-legacy in that it helps in injecting polyfills for older browsers, but it is a more dynamic solution that serves polyfills based on the actual browser making the request.

README

@vitejs/plugin-legacy

Vite's default browser support baseline is Native ESM, native ESM dynamic import, and import.meta. This plugin provides support for legacy browsers that do not support those features when building for production.

By default, this plugin will:

• Generate a corresponding legacy chunk for every chunk in the final bundle, transformed with @babel/preset-env and emitted as SystemJS modules (code splitting is still supported!).

• Generate a polyfill chunk including SystemJS runtime, and any necessary polyfills determined by specified browser targets and actual usage in the bundle.

• Inject <script nomodule> tags into generated HTML to conditionally load the polyfills and legacy bundle only in browsers without widely-available features support.

• Inject the import.meta.env.LEGACY env variable, which will only be true in the legacy production build, and false in all other cases.

Usage

// vite.config.js
import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      targets: ['defaults', 'not IE 11'],
    }),
  ],
}

Terser must be installed because plugin-legacy uses Terser for minification.

npm add -D terser

Options

targets

• Type: string | string[] | { [key: string]: string }

• Default: 'last 2 versions and not dead, > 0.3%, Firefox ESR'

  If explicitly set, it's passed on to @babel/preset-env.

  The query is also Browserslist compatible. See Browserslist Best Practices for more details.

  If it's not set, plugin-legacy will load the browserslist config sources and then fallback to the default value.

polyfills

• Type: boolean | string[]

• Default: true

  By default, a polyfills chunk is generated based on the target browser ranges and actual usage in the final bundle (detected via @babel/preset-env's useBuiltIns: 'usage').

  Set to a list of strings to explicitly control which polyfills to include. See Polyfill Specifiers for details.

  Set to false to avoid generating polyfills and handle it yourself (will still generate legacy chunks with syntax transformations).

additionalLegacyPolyfills

• Type: string[]

  Add custom imports to the legacy polyfills chunk. Since the usage-based polyfill detection only covers ES language features, it may be necessary to manually specify additional DOM API polyfills using this option.

  Note: if additional polyfills are needed for both the modern and legacy chunks, they can simply be imported in the application source code.

modernPolyfills

• Type: boolean | string[]

• Default: false

  Defaults to false. Enabling this option will generate a separate polyfills chunk for the modern build (targeting browsers that support widely-available features).

  Set to a list of strings to explicitly control which polyfills to include. See Polyfill Specifiers for details.

  Note it is not recommended to use the true value (which uses auto-detection) because core-js@3 is very aggressive in polyfill inclusions due to all the bleeding edge features it supports. Even when targeting native ESM support, it injects 15kb of polyfills!

  If you don't have hard reliance on bleeding edge runtime features, it is not that hard to avoid having to use polyfills in the modern build altogether. Alternatively, consider using an on-demand service like Polyfill.io to only inject necessary polyfills based on actual browser user-agents (most modern browsers will need nothing!).

renderLegacyChunks

• Type: boolean

• Default: true

  Set to false to disable legacy chunks. This is only useful if you are using modernPolyfills, which essentially allows you to use this plugin for injecting polyfills to the modern build only:

  import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'
  
  export default {
    plugins: [
      legacy({
        modernPolyfills: [
          /* ... */
        ],
        renderLegacyChunks: false,
      }),
    ],
  }
  

externalSystemJS

• Type: boolean

• Default: false

  Defaults to false. Enabling this option will exclude systemjs/dist/s.min.js inside polyfills-legacy chunk.

renderModernChunks

• Type: boolean

• Default: true

  Set to false to only output the legacy bundles that support all target browsers.

Browsers that supports ESM but does not support widely-available features

The legacy plugin offers a way to use widely-available features natively in the modern build, while falling back to the legacy build in browsers with native ESM but without those features supported (e.g. Legacy Edge). This feature works by injecting a runtime check and loading the legacy bundle with SystemJs runtime if needed. There are the following drawbacks:

• Modern bundle is downloaded in all ESM browsers
• Modern bundle throws SyntaxError in browsers without those features support

The following syntax are considered as widely-available:

• dynamic import
• import.meta
• async generator

Polyfill Specifiers

Polyfill specifier strings for polyfills and modernPolyfills can be either of the following:

• Any core-js 3 sub import paths - e.g. es/map will import core-js/es/map

• Any individual core-js 3 modules - e.g. es.array.iterator will import core-js/modules/es.array.iterator.js

Example

import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      polyfills: ['es.promise.finally', 'es/map', 'es/set'],
      modernPolyfills: ['es.promise.finally'],
    }),
  ],
}

Content Security Policy

The legacy plugin requires inline scripts for Safari 10.1 nomodule fix, SystemJS initialization, and dynamic import fallback. If you have a strict CSP policy requirement, you will need to add the corresponding hashes to your script-src list:

• sha256-MS6/3FCg4WjP9gwgaBGwLpRCY6fZBgwmhVCdrPrNf3E=
• sha256-tQjf8gvb2ROOMapIxFvFAYBeUJ0v1HCbOcSmDNXGtDo=
• sha256-8uUkKieevHiD3yYtzjkRvyDZWt+uZkBLuGEQWNiV3+c=
• sha256-+5XkZFazzJo8n0iOP4ti/cLCMUudTf//Mzkb7xNPXIc=

These values (without the sha256- prefix) can also be retrieved via

import { cspHashes } from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'

When using the regenerator-runtime polyfill, it will attempt to use the globalThis object to register itself. If globalThis is not available (it is fairly new and not widely supported, including IE 11), it attempts to perform dynamic Function(...) call which violates the CSP. To avoid dynamic eval in the absence of globalThis consider adding core-js/proposals/global-this to additionalLegacyPolyfills to define it.

References

• Vue CLI modern mode
• Using Native JavaScript Modules in Production Today
• rollup-native-modules-boilerplate