Vite partnership and plugin are a part of Agent Week. A week of announcements focused on making it easier, faster, and safer to go from prompt to production.

As part of Agent Week, we’re excited to announce that Netlify is now the Official Deployment Partner for Vite–joining TanStack and Astro as our third official partnership. As I posted a few months ago: “TanStack for apps. Astro for sites. Vite under the hood.”

Since its launch in 2020, Vite has fast become a corner-stone of the modern web. It’s the toolchain of choice for almost all modern web frameworks such as Astro, TanStack Start, React Router, Nuxt, SolidStart, Angular.

At Netlify we see that more than 60% of all deploys coming from agents like Windsurf or Bolt use Vite.

Why Netlify ❤️ Vite

To me, Evan You has also always stood out as one of the most inspiring developers in the frontend open-source community. First, by leading the Vue community, and then, by redefining frontend builds and dev servers. Now, we’re excited to work with Evan to make this relationship official with deeper technical integration and collaboration.

This partnership formalizes what we’ve seen in practice. Vite has become the foundational build tool powering the modern web. It’s a go-to tool for developers and AI agents alike for anything web that needs hot module reloading and efficient bundling. It works great with any modern deployment platform and comes without vendor lock-in.

As we partner with the VoidZero and Vite team, and Vite now forms the backbone of the vast majority of frameworks, there’s an opportunity for us to more deeply integrate across all frameworks by integrating closer with Vite itself.

New Vite plugin for Netlify

The new Netlify Vite plugin brings our entire platform and its primitives directly into your local development environment. When building alongside agents, this means they can build, test, and iterate with full production capabilities from the moment they generate code.

Until now, getting access to all of Netlify’s primitives when running a dev server on localhost required developers to install the netlify CLI and run our netlify dev command, wrapping the native dev server for their framework.

With the new plugin, we can take advantage of Vite’s advanced environment API to embed our primitives directly into Vite’s dev server instead of wrapping it with the Netlify CLI. This creates a much more homogenous and uniform developer experience across any framework building on top of Vite – or even projects using Vite directly without any framework.

Installing the plugin

If you don’t already have a Vite project, you can start with a scaffolded project by running npm create vite@latest and follow the setup prompts. You can choose the framework for your project, including React, Vue, Svelte, Solid, Vanilla, and more.

Install the plugin by running npm install -D @netlify/vite-plugin in your project directory.

In root directory of your project, in your Vite config file, vite.config.ts, add the @netlify/vite-plugin package to your plugins array:

import netlify from "@netlify/vite-plugin";

// https://vite.dev/config/
export default {
  plugins: [netlify()],
};

Run your server with npx vite and the Netlify platform will be seamlessly emulated. With the Vite plugin installed, you or an agent get immediate access to build with:

• Serverless functions
• Edge functions
• Blobs
• Cache API
• Redirects & rewrites
• Headers
• Environment variables

All within your local development flow.

Try the live demo → - See a Vite app powered by the plugin, then deploy your own version with one click.

The plugin works out-of-the-box with vanilla Vite projects, and as a fast-follow we’re updating all Netlify adapters for Vite-based frameworks (like our Astro adapter) to automatically use this plugin under the hood.

Note: This first release doesn’t have full parity with netlify dev—features like local image CDN emulation will come later.

AX starts locally

By investing deeper in Vite, we’re creating the infrastructure and agent experience that AI development workflows require with instant access to production capabilities, clean local-to-production transitions, and zero-config setup that works as well for agents as it does for developers.

Teams adopting AI into their workflows now have a reliable, unified pipeline from first prompt to production. With direct access to Netlify’s deploy previews, secrets scanning, and platform primitives, the gap between AI-generated code and live applications continues to get smaller.

What’s next

Today, we brought our platform into your local development environment. But what if agents could go beyond building locally? What if they could deploy, manage, and iterate on applications directly?

That’s what we’ll explore tomorrow, as we unveil the next piece of the agent experience: a direct interface for agents to interact with Netlify.

Get started with the Vite plugin today and let us know what your experience is like.