Table of Contents

Limits and non-goals

NiteFx is intentionally smaller than Vite. Knowing where the edges are before you start saves you finding them halfway through a project.

Non-goals

Vite and Rollup plugins. Vue single-file components, Svelte, Astro, MDX and similar need Vite's plugin pipeline and a JavaScript runtime in the build. If your project depends on them, Vite is the right tool. (PostCSS plugins and Tailwind plugins do work: see Stylesheets.)

Server-side rendering of components. Islands render on the client; use the fallback content inside <island> for what the server shows first. Meta-frameworks with their own servers (Next.js, Remix, Nuxt) are out of scope.

Type checking. Like Vite, NiteFx strips types without checking them, so compiling stays fast. Your editor checks as you type; run tsc --noEmit in CI. See TypeScript.

Running arbitrary Node tooling. NiteFx does not provide a Node-compatible runtime for your scripts: linters, test runners and code generators keep running however you run them today.

Packages

  • Registry packages only. git:, file:, link:, workspace:, tarball URLs and npm: aliases are not supported.
  • Install scripts never run. Packages that compile native addons or download binaries in postinstall do not work. NiteFx warns about them when it resolves them (Install scripts).
  • Optional dependencies are skipped.
  • No overrides or resolutions. Versions come from the ranges, the lockfile and nite update.
  • No workspaces. One nite.json per project.

Compilation

  • Fast Refresh is heuristic. Components are found in esbuild's output by shape: PascalCase functions, arrow functions, memo and forwardRef. Class components and other higher-order components refresh by propagating to their importers. If a custom hook changes its internal hook order, save again or reload.
  • No Babel plugins and no syntax that needs one.
  • No import.meta.glob, and no Vite import suffixes (?raw, ?url, ?worker, ?inline). Use explicit imports, fetch, and new Worker(new URL("./worker.ts", import.meta.url), { type: "module" }).
  • SVGs import as URLs, not as React components (no svgr).

Stylesheets

  • No Stylus.
  • Tailwind CSS 4 only, not 3.
  • PostCSS and Tailwind plugins must be plain JavaScript, since they run in an interpreter. The interpreter is also slower than Node: the first Tailwind compile in a session takes a second or two.
  • CSS that a package's own JavaScript imports is not collected; import the package's stylesheet from your code.
  • No css.modules options such as localsConvention.
  • Relative url()s inside Sass partials are not rebased to the partial's folder.

Hosting

  • Production asset URLs assume the site root. Bundles and chunks load from /_nite/.... HTML from MapNiteSpa and the tag helpers include the request's path base, but URLs inside JavaScript and CSS (lazy chunks, url() assets) do not, so hosting under a subfolder (/shop) does not fully work yet.
  • Hashed bundles are revalidated, not cached as immutable. MapStaticAssets serves them with ETags and no-cache, so repeat visits cost a 304 per file. A CDN rule can cache /_nite/* long-term safely.

Platform

  • .NET 10 and ASP.NET Core 10.
  • Linux, macOS and Windows on x64 and Arm64. Other platforms work wherever esbuild (and, for Sass, Dart Sass) publish binaries, or with NITE_ESBUILD_PATH / NITE_SASS_PATH.

Status

NiteFx is at version 0.8. APIs outside AddNite, UseNite, MapNiteSpa, the tag helpers and nite.json may change between minor versions. Bugs and gaps are tracked on GitHub. Which of these limits go away next is on the roadmap.

Edit this page