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Migration playbook: Custom Webpack → Turbopack / Vite

Webpack to Turbopack and Vite migration

Replace a fragile custom Webpack configuration with Turbopack or Vite, which start faster and need far less configuration.

Talk to an engineer
Web & frontend

Migration drivers

Why teams make this move

Driver 01

Slow starts and rebuilds

Developers waiting on cold starts every time they start the dev server or switch branches.

Driver 02

Fragile plugins

Babel and Webpack loaders that break on Node.js or dependency upgrades.

Driver 03

Slow CI builds

Long production builds that delay urgent fixes.

Execution sequence

How the migration runs

Each phase ends with a check you can verify — data parity, error rates, latency — and the rollback path is agreed before any traffic moves.

  1. 01Phase

    Loader and plugin audit

    Cataloging custom Webpack rules (SVGs, CSS Modules, workers) and mapping each to a Vite or Turbopack equivalent.

  2. 02Phase

    ES modules and SWC

    Compiling TypeScript and JSX with SWC or esbuild.

  3. 03Phase

    Aliases and environment variables

    Standardizing import aliases (@/) and environment variable handling.

  4. 04Phase

    Production build

    Tuning chunk splitting and checking the production output matches the old build.

Risk prevention

Pitfalls that derail this migration

Risk 01

Implicit global polyfills

Webpack 4 injected Buffer and process into client code; Vite needs explicit polyfills.

Risk 02

Dynamic require()

CommonJS dynamic require() calls that fail in native ES module environments.

Risk 03

SCSS variable imports

Misconfigured preprocessor options that break global theme variables.

Before and after

What we measure

We take a baseline before any change and report the same numbers after cutover, from your own tools. They are the evidence of whether the migration worked — not figures promised in advance.

Dev start
Cold start of the dev server, before and after
HMR time
Time from saving a file to the browser updating
CI build
Production build duration, from pipeline history

Questions

Frequently asked migration questions

It is written in Rust and built on an incremental computation engine that caches the result of each function in the build graph, so a change only recomputes what depends on it.

Yes — Jest keeps working, or you can move to Vitest, which reuses your Vite config and has a Jest-compatible API.

Rehearse the cutover before the real one

Tell us about your data volume, traffic and timeline. An engineer will reply within one business day to set up a call about the migration plan and its rollback path.

Request a strategy call