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Local development

When building projects on Cloudflare Workers, you have two options for local development:

Both Wrangler and the Vite plugin use Miniflare to provide an accurate local simulation of the Cloudflare Workers runtime, (workerd ↗). If you need to develop with remote resources, Wrangler is the only option, and provides remote development via the wrangler dev --remote command.

Choosing between Wrangler or Vite

Deciding between Wrangler and the Cloudflare Vite plugin depends on your project's focus and development workflow. Here are some quick guidelines to help you choose:

When to use Wrangler

  • Backend & Workers-focused: If you're primarily building APIs, serverless functions, or background tasks, use Wrangler.

  • Remote development: If your project needs the ability to develop and test using production resources and data on Cloudflare's network, use Wrangler's --remote flag.

  • Simple frontends: If you have minimal frontend requirements and don’t need hot reloading or advanced bundling, Wrangler may be sufficient.

When to use the Cloudflare Vite Plugin

Use the Vite plugin for:

  • Frontend-centric development: If you already use Vite with modern frontend frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte, or Solid, the Vite plugin integrates into your development workflow.

  • React Router v7: If you are using React Router v7 ↗ (the successor to Remix), it is officially supported by the Vite plugin as a full-stack SSR framework.

  • Rapid iteration (HMR): If you need near-instant updates in the browser, the Vite plugin provides Hot Module Replacement (HMR) ↗ during local development.

  • Advanced optimizations: If you require more advanced optimizations (code splitting, efficient bundling, CSS handling, build time transformations, etc.), Vite is a strong fit.

  • Greater flexibility: Due to Vite's advanced configuration options and large ecosystem of plugins, there is more flexibility to customize your development experience and build output.