Make license management part of Vite core

[bilalq]

The functionality afforded by webpack-license-plugin is critical for enterprise usage and something very nice to have even for smaller teams. A good chunk of bundle sizes can be attributed to license text. Externalizing that into its own file that gets referenced should improve performance and load times.

[jojomatik]

I'm experimenting with nuxt3 and need this feature (https://github.com/nuxt/framework/discussions/3376), would implementing this feature here make it available to my nuxt3 project?

[gkiely]

I tried requesting this in esbuild, but because it's in transform mode it is not supported.
evanw/esbuild#2385

[gkiely]

My solution for this was to use rollup-plugin-licence

build: {
  rollupOptions: {
    plugins: [
      license({
        thirdParty: {
          output: path.resolve(__dirname, './dist/assets/vendor.LICENSE.txt'),
        },
      }),
    ],
  },
},

and

{
  esbuild: {
    banner: '/*! licenses: /assets/vendor.LICENSE.txt */',
    legalComments: 'none',
  },
}

[jojomatik]

I've implemented this solution in my nuxt project as well (jojomatik/nuxt-3-base@a0c85bf). Works great! Thanks for the hint in the right direction. https://github.com/nuxt/framework/discussions/3376#discussioncomment-4101261

[TimJohns]

Confirming @gkiely's snippet also works in w/Vue3 with Vike for Prerender/SSG builds as well, w/trivial modification of the path to './dist/assets/client/vendor.LICENSE.txt'. (Thanks!)