vite-plugin-envsubst

A Vite plugin that transforms import.meta.env references to use runtime environment variables via envsubst or Caddy's templating engine. Built for deploying SPAs in Docker containers where the environment isn't known at build time, to prevent having to build per environment.

Why

Problem

When deploying SPAs in Docker, you often don't know your environment variables at build time. This is especially true when:

• You're using a cloud provider that assigns URLs/ports dynamically
• You have a dev/test/staging environment, where your resources may differ
• Your app is designed to be self-hosted

The typical solution is to build separate images per environment, which is inefficient, and quite frankly, annoying.

Solution

This plugin:

1. Scans your vite-env.d.ts file for environment variable declarations
2. Transforms only matching declared import.meta.env references to use a global object
3. Injects a script in index.html that initializes environment variables with placeholder ENV variables.

Install

npm install vite-plugin-envsubst --save-dev

Usage

// vite.config.ts
import { defineConfig } from "vite";
import { envSubstPlugin } from "vite-plugin-envsubst";

export default defineConfig({
    plugins: [
        envSubstPlugin({
            globalObject: "globalThis", // optional, defaults to globalThis
            templateEngine: "envsubst", // optional, "envsubst" (default) or "caddy"
            include: [/\\.[cm]?[jt]sx?$/], // optional, files to transform
            exclude: [/node_modules/], // optional, files to skip
        }),
    ],
});

Your environment variables must be declared in src/vite-env.d.ts:

/// <reference types="vite/client" />

interface ImportMetaEnv {
    readonly VITE_API_URL: string;
    readonly VITE_APP_TITLE: string;
    readonly UNUSED_VARIABLE: string; // only variables prefixed with `envPrefix` (default VITE_) are transformed
}

interface ImportMeta {
    readonly env: ImportMetaEnv;
}

Then use them in your code as normal:

console.log(import.meta.env.VITE_API_URL);

Nginx with envsubst

When building with vite, this injects this script in your index.html, and transforms all import.meta.env.VITE_* variables into globalThis.env.VITE_* variables.

<script>
    globalThis.env = globalThis.env || {};
    globalThis.env.VITE_APP_TITLE = "${VITE_APP_TITLE}";
</script>

After building, in your docker entrypoint, make sure envsubst is called on the corresponding index.html. In nginx:alpine, this looks like:

FROM nginx:alpine
WORKDIR /usr/share/nginx/html

COPY nginx/nginx.conf /etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf
COPY nginx/envsubst-on-index.sh /docker-entrypoint.d/50-envsubst-on-index.sh
RUN chmod +x /docker-entrypoint.d/50-envsubst-on-index.sh

COPY --from=builder dist .

# envsubst-on-index.sh
#!/bin/sh
envsubst < /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html > /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html.tmp
mv /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html.tmp /usr/share/nginx/html/index.html

Note that envsubst is typically not included in hardened nginx images, such as chainguard's.

Caddy

To use Caddy's templating engine instead of envsubst:

envSubstPlugin({
    templateEngine: "caddy",
});

<script>
    globalThis.env = globalThis.env || {};
    globalThis.env.VITE_APP_TITLE = "{{env "VITE_APP_TITLE"}}";
</script>

Features

• Transforms only variables declared in your vite-env.d.ts
• Guards against rewriting assignments like import.meta.env.VAR = ...
• Uses sourcemap-preserving string transforms via rolldown-string
• Optional include/exclude filtering for faster builds
• Respects Vite's envPrefix configuration
• TypeScript
• Only one runtime dependencies (rolldown-string)
• Only runs during build (so dev server works as expected)

License

MIT or APACHE 2.0