vite-plugin-serve-ipc

Serve Vite's development or preview server over IPC. Supports Unix domain sockets and Windows named pipes.

The IPC server is a lightweight proxy that forwards connections to Vite's TCP port. This avoids dealing with conflicting or dynamic ports when other local processes need to talk to your app. It's essentially a more reliable alternative to strictPort.

Warning

This plugin is still in active development. It has not been thoroughly tested across a variety of configurations yet. Please file an issue if you encounter any shenanigans.

Usage

Add serveIPC to your Vite config:

import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import { serveIPC } from "vite-plugin-serve-ipc";

export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [
        serveIPC({ path: "test.sock" })
    ]
});

Options

Detailed documentation can be found in types.d.ts.

path

The path for the IPC proxy to listen on.

Basic path

path: "test.sock"

The provided path will be resolved against the current working directory. On Windows \\?\pipe\ will be prepended.

The example will listen at $(pwd)/test.sock on Unix-like platforms and \\?\pipe\X:\current-working-directory\test.sock on Windows.

Individual platform paths

path: {
    unix: "test.sock",
    windows: "\\\\.\\pipe\\test"
}

If the provided windows name doesn't start with \\.\pipe\ or \\?\pipe\ then \\?\pipe\ will be prepended.

Disabling IPC for a platform

path: {
    unix: "test.sock",
    windows: null
}

listenOptions

Custom ListenOptions to pass to the IPC proxy:

listenOptions: {
    readableAll: true,
    writableAll: true,
    // etc.
}

The path, host, port, reusePort and ipv6Only options will be ignored.

References

• vitejs/vite#674
• node:net - IPC support
• unix(7) - sockets for local interprocess communication
• Microsoft Win32 apps - Named pipes

Changelog

See releases.