@sanity/visual-editing-standalone

Self-contained, ESM-only Visual Editing for applications that do not otherwise use React.

The entire API is a single entry point:

import {createDataAttribute, enableVisualEditing} from '@sanity/visual-editing-standalone'

All runtime code—including the internal React renderer, React DOM, styled-components, and Sanity UI—is compiled into package-internal ESM chunks. Installing it adds no production or peer dependencies, and the exact bundled versions are listed in the inlinedDependencies field of package.json.

The overlays' static stylesheet ships as the ./styles.css export — named after the @sanity/ui@4 subpath it repackages — and must be imported explicitly, as shown in Import the stylesheet. The published JS never references the stylesheet itself, so the package loads in every ESM runtime — bundlers, Node, esm.sh, import maps — without CSS-handling support.

When to use this package

Use this package with Vue, Nuxt, Svelte, Astro, vanilla JavaScript, or another ESM-native environment where installing and bundling the React dependency graph is undesirable.

React applications should use @sanity/visual-editing instead. This package embeds its own React runtime, so using it in a React application would ship a second copy.

The word "standalone" describes this package's self-contained distribution. It is unrelated to the standalone value reported by Visual Editing environment APIs.

Install

npm install @sanity/visual-editing-standalone

No React packages need to be installed alongside it.

Import the stylesheet

Import the overlays' static styles once, wherever Visual Editing is enabled:

import '@sanity/visual-editing-standalone/styles.css'

Bundlers handle the import like any other stylesheet. Without a bundler, add a <link> tag instead, as in the esm.sh example below.

Skipping the stylesheet does not break the overlays, but the loading-spinner animation, screen-reader-only hiding, and label ellipsis rules go missing.

Enable Visual Editing

Only load Visual Editing in the browser while draft or preview mode is active:

import '@sanity/visual-editing-standalone/styles.css'
import {enableVisualEditing} from '@sanity/visual-editing-standalone'

const disableVisualEditing = enableVisualEditing({
  history: {
    subscribe: (navigate) => {
      const onPopState = () => {
        navigate({type: 'pop', url: location.href})
      }

      addEventListener('popstate', onPopState)
      return () => removeEventListener('popstate', onPopState)
    },
    update: (update) => {
      if (update.type === 'push') history.pushState(null, '', update.url)
      if (update.type === 'replace') history.replaceState(null, '', update.url)
      if (update.type === 'pop') history.back()
    },
  },
})

// Call this when preview mode is disabled or the page is torn down.
disableVisualEditing()

The overlay renderer stays in a separate lazy chunk that only loads when enableVisualEditing() is called. Applications that only import createDataAttribute never load it, and since the JS is side-effect free any bundler can tree-shake the unused enableVisualEditing export away entirely.

The standalone options are framework-neutral. React-based custom overlay components and plugins remain available from @sanity/visual-editing.

Create data attributes

Use createDataAttribute for values that cannot carry stega encoding, such as images, numbers, and booleans:

import {createDataAttribute} from '@sanity/visual-editing-standalone'

const dataSanity = createDataAttribute({
  baseUrl: 'https://example.sanity.studio',
  id: 'post-1',
  type: 'post',
  path: 'mainImage',
}).toString()

Load from esm.sh

The package can be loaded directly as a browser module — add the stylesheet with a <link> tag:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://esm.sh/@sanity/visual-editing-standalone@2/styles.css" />
<script type="module">
  import {
    createDataAttribute,
    enableVisualEditing,
  } from 'https://esm.sh/@sanity/visual-editing-standalone@2'

  document.querySelector('h1').dataset.sanity = createDataAttribute({
    baseUrl: 'https://example.sanity.studio',
    id: 'post-1',
    type: 'post',
    path: 'title',
  }).toString()

  enableVisualEditing()
</script>

Pin an exact package version in production when deterministic CDN output is required.