"A completely different beast from its previous version"

Vue CLI is the standard build toolchain for Vue.js development. The latest release, 3.0 has everything you have hoped for! Vue CLI 3.0 has tons of new features that aim to realize one main goal: less configuring, more coding. Let’s have a closer look at everything the new release has to offer.

Exciting news for Vue CLI! The 3.0 release is here!

Last Friday, the team behind Vue CLI, the standard build toolchain for Vue applications, announced the latest release that is packed with amazing new features!

According to the announcement, this release is going to be “a completely different beast from its previous version!” The same source mentions that there are two main drivers behind the decision to rewrite it:

To reduce configuration fatigue of modern frontend tooling, especially when mixing multiple tools together

To incorporate best practices in the toolchain as much as possible so it becomes the default for any Vue app

Let’s have a closer look at the main features of the 3.0 release.

As less configuration as possible

Vue CLI 3.0 aims to save you from unnecessary plumbing by making sure that all its features work nicely together. More precisely, the list of what the latest release offers includes:

Rich built-in features – Out-of-the-box support for Babel, TypeScript, ESLint, PostCSS, PWA, Unit Testing & End-to-end Testing.

Extensibility – The plugin system allows the community to build and share reusable solutions to common needs.

Configurability with no need to eject – When you scaffold a project via Vue CLI 3, it installs the Vue CLI runtime service (@vue/cli-service), selected feature plugins, and generates the necessary config files for you. In most cases, you just need to focus on writing the code.

Graphical User Interface – Create, develop and manage your projects through an accompanying graphical user interface.

Instant prototyping – It isn’t fun to wait for npm install before you can write any code. With Vue CLI 3’s vue serve command, this is all you need to do to start prototyping with Vue single-file components.

Versatility and future-ready – You can effortlessly ship native ES2015 code for modern browsers, or build your Vue components as native web components.

Check out the Vue CLI 3 documentation for further details on the new features.

Getting started

You can install the new package using one of those commands:

npm install -g @vue/cli # OR yarn global add @vue/cli

You can create a new project using:

vue create my-project # OR vue ui

Keep in mind that Vue CLI requires Node.js version 8.9 or above (8.11.0+ recommended). You can also manage multiple versions of Node on the same machine with nvm or nvm-windows.