Improved search, Vite 8 and React strict mode by default

v6 is a focused major release. Your schemas, plugins, configuration shape, and content APIs are unchanged, so for most studios this is a one-line upgrade:

npm install sanity@latest

The bump is clean if your studio runs on Node.js 22.12 or newer, runs cleanly under React strict mode, and has no custom auth.providers. Otherwise, test against the pre-release first (npm install sanity@next-major) and work through the changes below.

• Node.js 20 dropped. With Node.js 20 at end of life, the minimum is now Node.js 22.12, matching the Sanity CLI. Upgrade Node and set engines.node to >=22.12. Only affects builds still on Node 20.

• React strict mode on by default in development. Strict mode surfaces existing effect-cleanup and concurrent-rendering bugs earlier in development. It doesn't create new ones. Opt out with reactStrictMode: false in sanity.cli.
• Custom auth providers now replace by default. auth.providers now replaces the built-in providers instead of appending them, and mode: 'append' is no longer supported. To keep the old behavior, use the callback config instead. (This one breaks existing mode: 'append' setups.)
• Default search strategy is now groq2024. It replaces groqLegacy as the default: better performance on large datasets, deeper nested-content and full Portable Text coverage, and Google-style queries (wildcards, phrases, negation). Search results, ordering, and counts may shift slightly, since each strategy uses different query logic. For most studios this is an improvement you won't need to act on. To keep the old behavior, set search.strategy back to groqLegacy.

Vite 8. The Studio build moves to Vite 8, with build times between 2–9× faster in our internal testing, and smaller bundles from better tree shaking. The React plugin updates automatically. If you customize the Vite config in sanity.cli, run the pre-release before bumping to catch any breakage.