Server integration

To integrate Vike with a JavaScript server, we recommend using the vike-server extension which automatically integrates Vike with JavaScript servers (Express.js, Hono, Fastify, ...) and deployment providers (Cloudflare, Vercel, ...) in a seamless fashion.

But you can also manually integrate Vike into your server for full control over your server and deployment.

Manual integration

From the perspective of a server, Vike is just a middleware:

// renderPage() doesn't depend on Node.js and can be used within any JavaScript environment:
// Node.js, AWS, Cloudflare, Vercel, Deno, Bun, Lagon, ...
import { renderPage } from 'vike/server'
 
// Any server: Express.js, Cloudflare Worker, AWS Lambda Function, Fastify, Hono, Nitro, ...
server.addMiddleware({
  method: 'GET',
  route: '*', // catch-all
  async handler(request) {
    const pageContextInit = { urlOriginal: request.url }
    const pageContext = await renderPage(pageContextInit)
    // `body` is the HTML of the page with a route matching pageContextInit.urlOriginal
    const { body, statusCode, headers } = pageContext.httpResponse
    const response = { body, statusCode, headers }
    return response
  }
})

You can embed renderPage() into any server and any deployment environment.

Alternatively, instead of using renderPage(), you can pre-render your pages and remove the need for a production server (and deploy to a static host instead).

Your server code won't be transpiled by Vite out of the box, see #562 - Transpile server code for a list of tools to transpile server code (e.g. to support TypeScript).

If you want to use HTTPS in development, pass the HTTPS certificates to Vite's dev server.

You can use:

Any server framework (Express, Fastify, Hono, Nitro, Hattip, Koa, Hapi, ...)
Any authentication strategy/tool (email/password, OAuth, Auth.js, Passport.js, Grant, Keycloak, Auth0, ...).
Any serverless/edge environment (Cloudflare Workers, Vercel, Firebase, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Deno Deploy, ...)
Any virtual private server (AWS EC2, Google Cloud, ...)
Any static host (Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages, Netlify, ...)
Any server utility (Docker, Nginx, PM2, ...)

Examples:

Non-JavaScript Backend

You can use Vike with any non-JavaScript backend using the following setup:

Your non-JavaScript backend implements all the backend business logic while exposing a REST/GraphQL API.
Your Vike app uses that REST/GraphQL API to render your pages to HTML with SSR or SSG. (The client-side of your Vike app then hydrates the HTML into a rich interactive user interface.)

If want to use SSR then, in addition to your non-JavaScript server, you'll need to deploy a JavaScript SSR server (with Node.js/Deno/Bun, or with an edge worker). Since that JavaScript server is only responsible for server-side rendering your pages to HTML, you can simply deploy it to a serverless/edge platform such as Cloudflare which is inexpensive and scalable.

Alternatively, instead of using a JavaScript server, you can pre-render your pages (SSG) while disabling SSR. In other words: you generate empty HTML shells that you statically deploy (using a static host, or using your own static assets deployment).

The HTML must be generated by Vike because the UI is completely owned by React/Vue/Solid. You cannot generate the HTML using your non-JavaScript backend: React/Vue/Solid would otherwise throw a hydration mismatch.

That way, you can use Vike with any backend:

Java (Spring, Grails, ...)
PHP (Laravel, Symfony, CakePHP, ...)
Ruby on Rails
Python (Django, Flask, FastAPI, ...)
Elixir (Phoenix, ...)
Go (Gin, Echo, Fiber, ...)
Rust (Actix Web, Rocket, ...)
Backend-as-a-Service (Firebase, ..)
...

Example:

Ruby on Rails

Feel free to reach out if you run into any issues integrating a tool.

Server integration

Manual integration

Non-JavaScript Backend

See also