Vite 5 Released: Powered by Rollup 4

What happened

Vite 5 was released on November 16, 2023, per the official Vite blog. In the year since Vite 4, the tool's weekly npm downloads had jumped from 2.5 million to 7.5 million as more frameworks standardised on it, including RedwoodJS and Remix switching to Vite in the React ecosystem.

Rollup 4 and API cleanup

Vite 5 upgraded to Rollup 4 for its production builds, which the team said represented a big boost in build performance. The release focused on cleaning up the API by removing deprecated features and streamlining several long-standing issues, for example switching the define feature to use proper abstract-syntax-tree replacements instead of regular expressions. To future-proof the tool, Vite 5 required Node.js 18 or later and deprecated the CommonJS Node API.

Performance and warmup

On top of Rollup 4's improvements, Vite 5 introduced server.warmup, a new feature that lets developers define a list of modules to pre-transform as soon as the dev server starts, improving startup time. When using the open option, Vite also automatically warms up the app's entry point. A new performance guide accompanied the release to help developers identify and fix common issues.

Why it mattered

Vite 5 solidified the tool's position as the shared build infrastructure for much of the JavaScript ecosystem. The Rollup 4 upgrade and warmup feature delivered concrete performance gains, while the API cleanup and Node.js requirement set a cleaner foundation. At the same conference, the team previewed Rolldown, a Rust port of Rollup, signalling Vite's longer-term performance direction.

Related on Skillo

See also: Vite 4 and its Rollup 3 upgrade, Vite 6's Environment API.

Sources

• Vite 5.0 is out! (official Vite blog)

Published date reflects the original event date (2023-11-16). This article is original Skillo editorial written from the sources above; facts were verified in September 2026.