Inside a pipeline: demystifying Vite and its plugins

Vite is a request pipeline that transforms modules between a project and the browser. This talk explains its development server, production bundler, and plugin model through CSS, images, JSX, virtual modules, generated routes, virtual data, icons, and build information.

It then builds plugins with resolveId, load, and transform, before showing how lifecycle hooks such as config, configResolved, buildStart, and buildEnd extend Vite's behavior. The examples make the path from a source import to generated browser code explicit.