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.

Installation

npm install vite-plugin-singlefile --save-dev

or

yarn add vite-plugin-singlefile --dev

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 })

inlinePattern

Defaults to [], which will inline all recognized JavaScript and CSS assets. You can provide a string array of "glob" patterns to limit the inlining to certain assets. Any assets missed by your patterns will generate a warning (same as any unrecognized assets).

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.
• This plugin uses dual packages to support both ESM and CommonJS users. This should work automatically. Details:
  • https://nodejs.org/api/packages.html#packages_dual_package_hazard
  • https://www.sensedeep.com/blog/posts/2021/how-to-create-single-source-npm-module.html

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.)
• I wasn't able to persuade Jest to run on the bare source file, so it instead compiles and runs the CommonJS distribution file.

License

MIT