Page 5: Deployment and Advanced Features

5. Deployment and Advanced Features

Deployment of SvelteKit applications is flexible thanks to various adapters, allowing you to optimize your app for different environments.

5.1. Deployment with Adapters

SvelteKit provides adapters for various deployment targets like Vercel, Netlify, Node, and Static. For example, to deploy to a Node.js server, install @sveltejs/adapter-node and configure svelte.config.js:

// svelte.config.js
import adapter from '@sveltejs/adapter-node';

/** @type {import('@sveltejs/kit').Config} */
const config = {
  kit: {
    adapter: adapter()
  }
};
export default config;

Then, build with npm run build and deploy the generated output.

5.2. Server-Side Rendering (SSR) and Static Site Generation (SSG)

• SSR (Server-Side Rendering): SvelteKit's default behavior. HTML is generated on the server at request time, leading to faster initial load times and better SEO.
• SSG (Static Site Generation): Using adapter-static, you can pre-build your app into entirely static HTML, CSS, and JS files. This is suitable for content-heavy websites with infrequent changes, served quickly via CDNs.

5.3. Other Advanced Features

• Pre-rendering: Specific routes can be pre-rendered into static files at build time.
• Hooks (src/hooks.server.js): Intercept requests on the server to handle global logic like authentication or modifying responses.
• Environment Variables: Safely manage environment variables using $env/static/private and $env/static/public.

With these five steps complete, you are now ready to create powerful and modern SvelteKit web applications.