Local development

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

• Wrangler, using the built-in wrangler dev command.
• Vite ↗, using the Cloudflare Vite plugin.

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 that provides remote development with the wrangler dev --remote command.

Choosing between Wrangler and Vite

Install and start your development server

Wrangler

Installation

To install Wrangler ↗, ensure you have Node.js ↗ and npm ↗ installed, preferably using a Node version manager like Volta ↗ or nvm ↗.

npm

npm install wrangler --save-dev

yarn

yarn add --dev wrangler

Start a development server

To start a development server using Wrangler, run the following:

npm

npx wrangler dev

pnpm

pnpm wrangler dev

yarn

yarn wrangler dev

Learn more about Wrangler

Vite Plugin

Installation

To install the Cloudflare Vite plugin, first start with a simple package.json

package.json

{
  "name": "cloudflare-vite-get-started",
  "private": true,
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "type": "module",
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "vite dev",
    "build": "vite build",
    "preview": "npm run build && vite preview",
    "deploy": "npm run build && wrangler deploy"
  }
}

Then, install the necessary development depenencies:

npm

npm i -D vite @cloudflare/vite-plugin wrangler

pnpm

pnpm add -D vite @cloudflare/vite-plugin wrangler

yarn

yarn add -D vite @cloudflare/vite-plugin wrangler

This command will install vite, along with @cloudflare/vite-plugin and wrangler as devDependencies in your package.json.

Start a development server

You can then start a development server by running:

npm

npm run dev

pnpm

pnpm run dev

yarn

yarn run dev

Learn more about the Vite plugin