vite-plugin-singlefile

vite-plugin-singlefile

This Vite build plugin allows you to inline all JavaScript and CSS resources directly into the final dist/index.html file. By doing this, your enter web app can be embedded and distributed as a single HTML file.

Why?

Bundling your entire site into one file certainly isn't recommended for most situations.

However, this can be very handy for offline web applications--apps you can simply opeen the HTML file in your default web browser. This might include utilities, expert system tools, documentation, demos, and other situations where you want the full power of a web browser, without the need for a Cordova or Electron wrapper or the pain of normal application installation.

Limitations

Web applications running from a local file have some browser security limitations:

• No ability to access external domains -- no images, no API calls, etc.
• Limited state management options -- no cookies, no localStorage. However, you can use the new FileSystem API, with user permission.
• Some web features that require a secure context may not be available.

This doesn't remove the build artifacts from the dist folder, it just embeds them in the index.html. You can ignore the extra files. I am open to a PR to remove the inlined files so the dist folder is cleaner, especially if there's a way to just prevent them from being written in the first place (i.e., not having to delete the files). (Note: removing the entries from ctx.bundle does not prevent the files from being written [#24].)

How do I use it?

Here's an example vite.config.ts file using this plugin for a Vue.js app:

import { defineConfig } from "vite"
import vue from "@vitejs/plugin-vue"
import { viteSingleFile } from "vite-plugin-singlefile"

export default defineConfig({
	plugins: [vue(), viteSingleFile()],
})

Config

You can pass a configuration object to modify how this plugin works. The options are described below:

useRecommendedBuildConfig

Defaults to true. This plugin will automatically adjust your vite configuration to allow assets to be combined int a single file. To disable this:

viteSingleFile({ useRecommendedBuildConfig: false })

Refer to the _useRecommendedBuildConfig function in the index.ts file of this repository to see the recommended configuration.

removeViteModuleLoader

Defaults to false. Vite includes a function in your build to load other bundles. Since we're inlining all bundles, you can use this option to have the bundle-loading function removed from your final build:

viteSingleFile({ removeViteModuleLoader: true })

Caveats

• favicon resources are not inlined by Vite, and this plugin doesn't do that either.
• There may be other situations where referenced files aren't inlined by Vite and aren't caught by this plugin either. I've done little testing so far, I just wanted to get this out there first.
• This is my first Vite and first Rollup plugin. I have no idea what I'm doing. PRs welcome.

Installation

yarn add vite-plugin-singlefile -D or npm i vite-plugin-singlefile -D

Contributing

• Please have PrettierJS installed so your IDE formatting doesn't overwrite the formatting in the source files
• Please clone vite-plugin-singlefile-example in a sister folder and use it to test your modifications to this plugin before submitting a PR. (I'm happy to take PRs for it as well if you want to add more edge cases to test, such as a large third-party dependency. It's pretty barebones for now.)

License

MIT