Building Modern Web Applications with Vite and DaisyUI - Integration Guide

In the ever-evolving landscape of web development, finding the right combination of tools can significantly impact your development experience and application performance. Today, we're diving into two groundbreaking technologies that work beautifully together: Vite, the lightning-fast build tool, and DaisyUI, the elegant Tailwind CSS component library.

👉 Free Sample that incorporates the concept: DaisyUI, Django, and Vite

Imagine starting a new project and having your development server up and running in milliseconds, not minutes. Picture writing clean, semantic component classes instead of long strings of utility classes. This is the reality when you combine Vite's blazing-fast development experience with DaisyUI's intuitive component system.

What is Vite

Vite (French for “quick”) is a modern front-end build tool that offers a faster and leaner development experience than older bundlers like Webpack. When it comes to modern web development, choosing the right build tool can significantly impact your experience. Vite takes a fundamentally different approach to development from Webpack.

Vite stands out as a modern frontend build tool that offers lightning-fast development through native ES modules, instant hot module replacement (HMR), out-of-the-box TypeScript support, optimized production builds using Rollup, true on-demand compilation, smart caching, efficient dependency pre-bundling with esbuild, and a robust plugin system, all while maintaining a simple configuration approach that makes it an excellent choice for modern web development projects.

Create a project with Vite

# Using npm
npm create vite@latest my-app

# Using yarn
yarn create vite my-app

# Using pnpm
pnpm create vite my-app

The the above commands are executed, Vite asks for the UI frontend to use (React, Vue, or Svelte) and Javascript or TypeScript support. The output usually is a simple codebase that provides all best practices.

my-app/
├── public/              # Static assets
├── src/                # Source files
│   ├── assets/         # Project assets
│   ├── components/     # Components
│   ├── App.jsx        # Root component
│   └── main.jsx       # Entry point
├── index.html          # Entry HTML
├── package.json        # Dependencies and scripts
└── vite.config.js      # Vite configuration

Integrate DaisyUI

For newcomers, DaisyUI is a plugin for Tailwind CSS that provides pre-made component classes while maintaining Tailwind’s utility-first approach. Before using DaisyUI, we need to install Tailwind:

# Install Tailwind CSS
npm install -D tailwindcss

# Install DaisyUI
npm install -D daisyui

Then, add DaisyUI to your tailwind.config.js:

module.exports = {
    plugins: [require("daisyui")],
}

At this point, we can use all components provided by the DaisyUI library bundled in development or production mode through Vite.

Django, Vite, and DaisyUI

A complete integration sample that uses Django as the backend framework can be found by accessing the below link:

👉 Django, Vite, and DaisyUI - Sources saved on Github

The project can be easily started by running these installation steps (also listed in the project README)

$ git clone https://github.com/app-generator/docs-django-daisy-ui.git
$ cd docs-django-daisy-ui
$ python manage.py makemigrations
$ python manage.py migrate
$ python manage.py runserver

For the front end part, we should use a different terminal:

$ yarn 
$ yarn dev     # development
$ yarn build   # production

By accessing the application we should see a splash screen that showcases a few DaisyUI Components.

Thanks for reading! For more resources and support feel free to access:

• 👉 Getting Started with Vite
• 👉 Getting Started with DaisyUI
• 👉 DaisyUI and Django Integration - documentation and free sample