@vitejs/plugin-legacy

Vite's default browser support baseline is Native ESM. This plugin provides support for legacy browsers that do not support native ESM when building for production.

By default, this plugin will:

• Generate a corresponding legacy chunk for every chunk in the final bundle, transformed with @babel/preset-env and emitted as SystemJS modules (code splitting is still supported!).

• Generate a polyfill chunk including SystemJS runtime, and any necessary polyfills determined by specified browser targets and actual usage in the bundle.

• Inject <script nomodule> tags into generated HTML to conditionally load the polyfills and legacy bundle only in browsers without native ESM support.

• Inject the import.meta.env.LEGACY env variable, which will only be true in the legacy production build, and false in all other cases.

Usage

// vite.config.js
import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      targets: ['defaults', 'not IE 11']
    })
  ]
}

When targeting IE11, you also need regenerator-runtime:

// vite.config.js
import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      targets: ['ie >= 11'],
      additionalLegacyPolyfills: ['regenerator-runtime/runtime']
    })
  ]
}

Options

targets

• Type: string | string[] | { [key: string]: string }

• Default: 'defaults'

  If explicitly set, it's passed on to @babel/preset-env.

  The query is also Browserslist compatible. The default value, 'defaults', is what is recommended by Browserslist. See Browserslist Best Practices for more details.

polyfills

• Type: boolean | string[]

• Default: true

  By default, a polyfills chunk is generated based on the target browser ranges and actual usage in the final bundle (detected via @babel/preset-env's useBuiltIns: 'usage').

  Set to a list of strings to explicitly control which polyfills to include. See Polyfill Specifiers for details.

  Set to false to avoid generating polyfills and handle it yourself (will still generate legacy chunks with syntax transformations).

additionalLegacyPolyfills

• Type: string[]

  Add custom imports to the legacy polyfills chunk. Since the usage-based polyfill detection only covers ES language features, it may be necessary to manually specify additional DOM API polyfills using this option.

  Note: if additional polyfills are needed for both the modern and legacy chunks, they can simply be imported in the application source code.

ignoreBrowserslistConfig

• Type: boolean

• Default: false

  @babel/preset-env automatically detects browserslist config sources:

  • browserslist field in package.json
  • .browserslistrc file in cwd.

  Set to false to ignore these sources.

modernPolyfills

• Type: boolean | string[]

• Default: false

  Defaults to false. Enabling this option will generate a separate polyfills chunk for the modern build (targeting browsers with native ESM support).

  Set to a list of strings to explicitly control which polyfills to include. See Polyfill Specifiers for details.

  Note it is not recommended to use the true value (which uses auto-detection) because core-js@3 is very aggressive in polyfill inclusions due to all the bleeding edge features it supports. Even when targeting native ESM support, it injects 15kb of polyfills!

  If you don't have hard reliance on bleeding edge runtime features, it is not that hard to avoid having to use polyfills in the modern build altogether. Alternatively, consider using an on-demand service like Polyfill.io to only inject necessary polyfills based on actual browser user-agents (most modern browsers will need nothing!).

renderLegacyChunks

• Type: boolean

• Default: true

  Set to false to disable legacy chunks. This is only useful if you are using modernPolyfills, which essentially allows you to use this plugin for injecting polyfills to the modern build only:

  import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'
  
  export default {
    plugins: [
      legacy({
        modernPolyfills: [
          /* ... */
        ],
        renderLegacyChunks: false
      })
    ]
  }

externalSystemJS

• Type: boolean

• Default: false

  Defaults to false. Enabling this option will exclude systemjs/dist/s.min.js inside polyfills-legacy chunk.

Dynamic Import

The legacy plugin offers a way to use native import() in the modern build while falling back to the legacy build in browsers with native ESM but without dynamic import support (e.g. Legacy Edge). This feature works by injecting a runtime check and loading the legacy bundle with SystemJs runtime if needed. There are the following drawbacks:

• Modern bundle is downloaded in all ESM browsers
• Modern bundle throws SyntaxError in browsers without dynamic import

Polyfill Specifiers

Polyfill specifier strings for polyfills and modernPolyfills can be either of the following:

• Any core-js 3 sub import paths - e.g. es/map will import core-js/es/map

• Any individual core-js 3 modules - e.g. es.array.iterator will import core-js/modules/es.array.iterator.js

Example

import legacy from '@vitejs/plugin-legacy'

export default {
  plugins: [
    legacy({
      polyfills: ['es.promise.finally', 'es/map', 'es/set'],
      modernPolyfills: ['es.promise.finally']
    })
  ]
}

Content Security Policy

The legacy plugin requires inline scripts for Safari 10.1 nomodule fix, SystemJS initialization, and dynamic import fallback. If you have a strict CSP policy requirement, you will need to add the corresponding hashes to your script-src list:

• sha256-MS6/3FCg4WjP9gwgaBGwLpRCY6fZBgwmhVCdrPrNf3E=
• sha256-tQjf8gvb2ROOMapIxFvFAYBeUJ0v1HCbOcSmDNXGtDo=
• sha256-4m6wOIrq/wFDmi9Xh3mFM2mwI4ik9n3TMgHk6xDtLxk=
• sha256-uS7/g9fhQwNZS1f/MqYqqKv8y9hCu36IfX9XZB5L7YY=

These values (without the sha256- prefix) can also be retrieved via

const { cspHashes } = require('@vitejs/plugin-legacy')

When using the regenerator-runtime polyfill, it will attempt to use the globalThis object to register itself. If globalThis is not available (it is fairly new and not widely supported, including IE 11), it attempts to perform dynamic Function(...) call which violates the CSP. To avoid dynamic eval in the absence of globalThis consider adding core-js/proposals/global-this to additionalLegacyPolyfills to define it.

References

• Vue CLI modern mode
• Using Native JavaScript Modules in Production Today
• rollup-native-modules-boilerplate