Inside a pipeline: demystifying Vite and its plugins

Vite processes requests between a project's files and the browser, transforming modules as they are requested and bundling the application for production. This talk uses images and other non-JavaScript imports to show why the browser receives JavaScript instead of the original source format.

It then introduces the three main plugin hooks, resolveId, load, and transform, and shows how multiple plugins pass module data through the pipeline. The final section explains virtual modules and how a plugin can generate code that does not exist on disk.