Web development, streamlined
After two years in development, SvelteKit has finally reached 1.0. As of today, it’s the recommended way to build Svelte apps of all shapes and sizes.
We’re so excited to share this release with you. It’s the culmination of thousands of hours of work, both from the Svelte core team and the wider community, and we think it’s the most enjoyable way to build production-grade websites, whether you’re a solo developer working on a small project or part of a large team.
To get started, run npm create svelte@latest, and visit the docs and (experimental!) interactive tutorial.
What is SvelteKit?
SvelteKit is a framework for building web applications on top of Svelte, a UI component framework that developers love for its performance and ease of use.
If you’ve used component frameworks like Svelte, you’ll know that they make it much easier to build user interfaces than working with the DOM directly. But they leave a lot of questions unanswered:
- How do I structure my source code?
- How do I add server-side rendering?
- How do I add routing that works on the server and in the browser?
- How do I make client-side routing accessible?
- How do I fetch data?
- How do I mutate data?
- How do I handle errors?
- How do I optimise my production build?
- How do I handle environment variables sensibly and securely?
- How do I add CSP headers and CSRF protection?
- How do I add a service worker that knows what to cache?
- How do I prepare my application for deployment?
An application framework is designed to answer these questions. SvelteKit does so with a design informed by the real world needs of an army of beta testers (many of whom have been running SvelteKit in production for some time — we salute your courage and thank you for the invaluable feedback) and the best ideas from other application frameworks including Next.js and Remix.
How is it different?
Web developers today are spoiled for choice. Aside from the aforementioned frameworks, there are options like Astro, battle-tested server frameworks like Rails and Laravel, and a million static site generators. These are all wonderful tools, and you should feel good about choosing them.
SvelteKit does things a little differently, however:
Unlike traditional ‘multi-page app’ or MPA frameworks, it defaults to client-side navigation after the initial server-rendered page load. This enables faster page transitions, state that persists between pages (such as a sidebar’s scroll position), and less data usage. It also avoids re-running third party scripts like analytics on every single page load.
Unlike traditional server frameworks, it allows you to use one language, instead of effectively having two tightly-coupled apps (one to generate HTML, one to handle client-side interaction). Because SvelteKit runs wherever JavaScript runs, you can deploy your app as a traditional Node server, or using serverless fu
