Ability to run a real production app and support for SPA

Description

When I am finished making my app and want to build it, I can do npm run build. Then to run it, I can do npm run serve, but wait, thats actually not for real production, thats for just previewing it locally. So now I have to make my own node+express script to serve the files in the dist folder. But then links like /dashboard fails because there is no dashboard folder. So now I have to add a catch all endpoint that routes to index.html file.

Suggested solution

Vite should just have a default script setting for running a full production app and optionally one more that route all other endpoint requests into index.html file like this:

{
    "start":"vite start",
    "start-spa": "vite start-spa"
}

With of course ways to configure the port number in the vite config file.

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

Validations

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[the-illarionov]

@TheInvoker oh, no, npm run serve does only 5% of static content serving ) It can’be used in production.

1. No cache handling.
2. No proxy.
3. No redirects.
4. No firewall
5. And lots of other network-engineering kitchen.

That’s why you don’t use any npm for production and use nginx for example, letting vite focus only on crafting assets, but not serving them. And in fact, you should to use npm run preview to emulate static hosting, because npm run serve works in development environment ) Serving static content is a much more complicated task then just “give me that image”, you can read more here

[bluwy]

I agree with @the-illarionov too. Closing as this is expected.

I feel like they should just have another thing to complete the remaining 20% (i.e. serve it for prod with spa re-routing).

I think we do at

https://github.com/vitejs/vite/blob/d76db0cae645beaecd970d95b4819158c5dd568a/packages/vite/src/node/preview.ts#L123