Background

Server-side rendered apps typically require two separate builds: one for the browser and another for the server environment. Nitro introduced a third build that combines browser assets, SSR bundle, and API routes into a single, optimized, self-contained output. Output is ready to deploy on any hosting platform, often requiring zero or minimal configuration and no code changes.

(For simplicity, some details, such as prerendering, are omitted from the diagram above.)

This design creates an open architecture that allows Nitro to function either as a standalone backend framework or as part of a meta-framework like Nuxt, while giving meta-frameworks the freedom to make their own frontend tooling choices.

While powerful, this approach also had some limitations with multi-builds:

• Lack of any standards to coordinate with meta-frameworks.
• Implementing multi-build pipelines is complicated.
• DX during development is limited (though Vite-Node improved this)
• Projects are limited to a single SSR and a single API app instance.
• Communication between different builds is limited and often one-way.

Nitro Vite Plugin

The Vite team announced the Environment API in 2024, based on prior experience, which can turn Vite into a powerful build orchestrator with unified DX.

With Nitro v3, we are betting on Vite as a powerful Build orchestrator and Fetch API as a universal standard cross-env communication (see H3 Beta article).

Thanks to the powerful Vite building blocks, the entire build configuration and pipeline can be easily defined via a simple Nitro Vite plugin in a unified and standard way for any meta-framework to extend.

Nitro Vite plugin introduces a new concept: Services. Services are nitro-managed fetchable Vite environments that can be defined by users or meta-frameworks and communicate with other services using the fetch() API.

For local development, the same configuration of environments and managed services is being used: