vite-plugin-react-worker

Plugin for Vite to enable react fast-refresh in web worker code. Developed for OffscreenCanvas support in react-three-fiber.

Last updated for Vite version 5.1.3.

:warning: Any update to Vite is likely to break this plugin! The plugin hot patches functionality from vite and @vitejs/plugin-react and is bound to break with updates in either. If you experience developer environment issues, suspect and disable this plugin before raising upstream issues.

This is experimental and unstable, don't rely on it working.

Installation

#npm
npm install vite-plugin-react-worker -D

#yarn
yarn add vite-plugin-react-worker --dev 

#bun
bun add vite-plugin-react-worker --dev

Add the plugin to Vite configuration in combination with @vitejs/plugin-react. Example version of ./vite.config.js:

import react from "@vitejs/plugin-react";
import reactWorker from "vite-plugin-react-worker";

export default {
  plugins: [react(), reactWorker()],
  //...other config.
};

The plugin has no configuration options.

How

This plugin is a merge of two plugins.

• reactWorkerPlugin will import a fast refresh module to any worker file entry. It will also find any files processed by @vitejs/react-plugin and change global references in hot reload code from window to globalThis.
• clientWorkerPlugin will modify Vites client code to be used by web workers and in that case use simplified HMR functionality.

Caveats

Except the already mentioned issues with stability due to patching other code, note the following:

• Not tested for SWC usage, assume it wont work.
• CSS imported in worker context will fail the plugin. This means all css imports must be removed from worker code.
• No code in workers can rely on window or document
• Inline workers using ?worker&inline are not supported.