How to make a build that is as similar as possible to development server?

[akiross]

In a couple of projects using vite, I had issues related to the build: the project would work as expected with vite development server, but wouldn't work after a build.

I'm not a vite expert and the steps used to transform the source code into the "final", running code are not very clear to me: minification, bundling, tree-shaking and generation of source maps are some of them, but there are likely many more - or they are more complex than I can figure. Issues are probably in my code, or 3rd party's, and in how they interact with all these transformations. Or maybe there's a bug in a tool somewhere, albeit unlikely.

Indeed, it's hard to track where the issue might be, especially if there is behind-the-scene caching or partial builds or similar things involved.

So, I was wondering if there is a way to build a project with vite that transforms the code as little as possible. I don't care about optimizations, about bundling or serving efficiency: ideally, the code is transformed as little as possible to be served as static content.

How can I achieve something like this? Something like producing precisely the code that the dev server is outputting, minus HMR, file watchers and similar niceties for development.

I'm using vite 5 in these projects, but I would consider migrating to 6 if not too painful and needed to answer this questionn.

Thank you!