The dev community claims we should be moving to Vite. It's "out of the box" capabilities seem to be enough for JS developers. Making Vite work in a PHP project with multiple CSS outputs however seems to require plenty of configuration, and fighting a system that was not designed for this purpose.
Failures:
- No full control over output filenames.
- No separated tasks, causing a page reload when only a HMR would be sufficient.
- No processing of empty files.
- No linting, or error notification.
- No sourcemaps.
Some of these can probably be overcome by adding more modules and adding further complexity to the setup. Considering the shaky core I did not feel it was worth exploring this.
My opinion may change in the future. The method-e branch came closest to my goals, if you wish to continue testing.
A related repo of mine is vite-for-wordpress.
/less/frontend.less > /public_html/assets/less-frontend.css
/less/backend.less > /public_html/assets/less-backend.css
/scss/frontend.scss > /public_html/assets/scss-frontend.css
/scss/backend.scss > /public_html/assets/scss-backend.css
/js/frontend.js > /public_html/assets/frontend.js
/js/backend.js > /public_html/assets/backend.js✔️ Run once
✔️ Run continously
❔ Run in development mode
❔ Run in production mode
✔️ Compile Less to CSS
✔️ Compile SCSS to CSS
✔️ Compile ES to JS
✔️ Autoprefix CSS
✔️ Minify CSS
✔️ Minify JS
❔ CSS sourcemaps
❔ JS sourcemaps
✔️ Multiple CSS tasks
✔️ Multiple JS tasks
✔️ Reload on CSS changes
✔️ Reload on JS changes
✔️ Reload on PHP changes
❔ Notification on CSS error
❔ Notification on JS error
✔️ Keep going on CSS error
✔️ Keep going on JS error