vike preview seemingly serves dist/server - unclear from docs, leads to missed issues with pre-rendering config

[mz8i]

Description

My understanding is that running vike preview always runs a local server based on dist/server, rather than simply serving the static files in dist/client - even for fully pre-rendered sites.

I ran into this as I was using vike preview to verify that the production build of a simple app I'm building works well. The app is hosted on GitHub Pages and so is fully pre-rendered.

But I had a bug in +onBeforePrerenderStart.ts for a certain route, where some of the values of a path parameter were not listed correctly. Testing with vike preview, this did not come up as an issue because the server bundle didn't rely on +onBeforePrerenderStart.ts at all. I only realised the problem after deploying the public site and getting a 404 for some URLs.

Perhaps the current behavior is the most sensible default - however, I think it should be stated more clearly in the docs and the startup output of the CLI command that this is exactly what's happening.

[brillout]

I agree, $ vike preview shouldn't use SSR when the page is pre-rendered. (It's actually a regression we had to introduce because of a Vite change, but let me have another look at it — I may have an idea.)