refactor!: serve command renamed to dev

[patak-cat]

Description

In the last team meeting we discussed renaming the vite serve command to vite dev.
We currently have

vite / vite serve   / pnpm run dev   | the dev server
       vite build   / pnpm run build | the build command
       vite preview / pnpm run serve | the preview server

It is confusing that pnpm run serve doesn't call vite serve but vite preview.

I think that dev looks good here, but this PR is marked as a draft because I don't know if we can proceed with the renaming. For this change to make sense, we should not only rename the command but also change 'serve' to 'dev' in the plugin and javascript API of Vite. If not, it is going to be equally confusing. The problem is that I don't see a way to make this change backward compatible. Plugins are using apply: 'serve' and are conditionally changing the config using command === 'serve'. The ecosystem may still be small enough to go through with this (by coordinating with plugin authors), but I don't think this is really workable.

I sent the PR anyways because it is easier to discuss by looking at the changeset.

In my opinion, we should leave serve as is. Rename pnpm run dev to pnm run serve and look for a different word for pnpm run {preview}. We can't use preview because of the pre/post scripts. Maybe show, stage? It isn't easy to find a better word than preview. If we find another word we could rename also the command so we end up with

vite / vite serve  / pnpm run serve | the dev server
       vite build  / pnpm run build | the build command
       vite stage  / pnpm run stage | the preview server

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What is the purpose of this pull request?

• Bug fix
• New Feature
• Documentation update
• Other

[Shinigami92]

I personally don't like pnpm run serve to serve preview, cause this would indicate a bit that it is somewhat safe to serve this in production.

stage would be a choice... what about demo? I would really prefer to tell the developer that this is really not for production.

[haoqunjiang]

stage and demo both look good to me.

But I prefer demo, in case users having a .env.staging file and a build:staging command. demo is less likely to cause confusion in that case.

[patak-cat]

I see that Astro is using preview as the script name for astro preview. SvelteKit is also using preview for this. @dominikg did you run into any issues with this choice?
@sodatea what was the problematic case you described with it? Shouldn't this only bring issues in case users would use view as a script name?

As an aside, both Astro and SvelteKit use dev instead of serve.

[dominikg]

I like consistency and dev/build/preview for both script and command names makes sense.

renaming vite serve to dev (both command and mode) would achieve this. keeping a serve alias around with a deprecation warning until vite3

[dominikg]

Also I completely agree that the preview command should be explicitly documented as "do not use in production" and it transpires that message in the name itself. serve could be misunderstood as ok for production use

[haoqunjiang]

Shouldn't this only bring issues in case users would use view as a script name?

Both view and prepreview behave inconsistently in different package managers.

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The case for prepreview is that I need build to be run before preview in E2E testing.
But now that pnpm stops supporting pre-scripts by default pnpm/pnpm#2891, I think I'll use npm-run-all instead.

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So for most users, yes, I think we only need to remind them of avoiding naming scripts as view

[patak-cat]

Closing in favor of #5207