This plugin assumes that the browser and Vite are running on the same machine

[ngld]

If I understood correctly, the plugin assumes that the browser can access config.root using the same path as Vite itself. However, if you're running Vite inside a VM or container (WSL, Vagrant, Docker), this is most likely not the case (even if the website is accessed through 127.0.0.1:<port>).

Having a configurable browserRoot option or something similar would be useful for these cases. I doubt it's possible for the plugin to automatically detect the correct path in all cases so it'd be nice to have a setting to override the auto-detected path. In some cases, better auto detection could help, as well. On WSL, the plugin could run wslpath -w /path/to/root to get the Windows path for the browser but even this solution makes assumptions because it's perfectly possible that the developer is running the browser itself in WSL (though it's probably a rare combination).

[bmeurer]

Yes, the assumption is that the devserver and the browser are running on the same machine. I admit that we didn't consider the container case yet.

How would browserRoot work?

[ngld]

Let's say that our root is /home/user/dev/project and the root of the VM is accessible as V: in Windows, then we could use the following configuration:

import {defineConfig} from 'vite';
import devtoolsJson from 'vite-plugin-devtools-json';

export default defineConfig({
  plugins: [
    devtoolsJson({ browserRoot: 'V:\\home\\user\\dev\\project' }),
    // ...
  ]
});

This would then generate the following configuration for the browser:

{
  "workspace": {
    "root": "V:\\home\\user\\dev\\project",
    "uuid": "6ec0bd7f-11c0-43da-975e-2a8ad9ebae0b"
  }
}

I think this would then allow the browser (which is running on Windows) to correctly access the project files inside the VM. The browserRoot option (if specified) would just replace the config.root value in the plugin logic.

I'm not strongly attached to the option name. Feel free to change it. I just think it'd be useful to have a method to manually change the value of root in the generated JSON if you know that the browser needs to access a different path.

[bmeurer]

This should be fairly straightforward by exposing the root as a setting (not sure if browserRoot) is the best name.

What I'm wondering though is, if for this case it'd be better to add a setting to control a VM/sandbox root (the V:\\ in your case)? That way you don't need to hardcode the full path in your config?