# Improved search, Vite 8 and React strict mode by default

**Version:** v6.0.0

**Published:** June 11, 2026

## Sanity Studio v6

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.

### Requirements

- **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.

### Behavior changes (new defaults)

- **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`.

### Under the hood

**Vite 8.** The Studio build moves to [Vite 8](https://vite.dev/blog/announcing-vite8), 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.