[Explanation] In production, vite-plugin-ssr doesn't load vite.config.js

[brillout]

⚠️ This only applies to SSR apps. If you use SSG you can ignore this.

Vite isn't loaded in production

In production, Vite isn't loaded at all. Because loading Vite and all your Vite plugins would considerably bloat your production server.

On a high-level, Vite really only is a development tool. So it makes sense to not load Vite in production.

Also, in restrictive environments such as on the edge (Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy, ...) we actually cannot load Vite.

Consequences

This has several consequences:

• Vite plugins that transform HTML cannot be applied in production. See [Workarounds] HTML transformers not applied for SSR apps #224.
• vite.config.js isn't loaded and therefore none of its configuration is available in production. (But that's usually ok since Vite configs are usually only about configuring dev & build.)