Studio development

Learn how the default local development environment for Sanity Studio works

Sanity Studio is distributed as a single package on npm. It also comes with built-in tooling for local development based on Vite. The package also exports the Studio as a React component, including a render function for mounting it on a DOM node in an HTML document.

Protip

Sanity Studio always connects to a dataset in the hosted Content Lake, also when run locally. Your content is never stored locally. This means that you can have differences in the schema between a local and a hosted Studio. If the Studio finds content in a document that doesn't match its schema, it will display a warning.

You can safely change schemas with the confidence that no existing content will be changed. To change content to comply with schema changes, you will need to run a migration script.

Prerequisites

  • An existing Studio project on your machine, created with the Sanity CLI. See Installation.
  • Node.js v22.12 or later and a package manager such as npm. See System requirements.

Local development

You can start a local development server with the following command within the Studio project folder:

# For Studios initiated with the CLI
npm run dev

# Alternative method
npx sanity dev

Official VS Code extension

Working in VS Code or Cursor? Check out the official extension.

To start the development server on a different port

The local development server will make the Studio available on http://localhost:3333 by default. You can specify the port with the following command:

# For Studios initiated with the CLI
npm run dev -- --port 3000

# Alternative method
npx sanity dev --port 3000

Gotcha

To run the Studio on a different port locally, you will have to enable CORS origins for that domain with authenticated requests enabled.

You can add this with the Sanity CLI by running the following command in your Studio project folder:

npx sanity cors add http://localhost:3000 --credentials

Local production build

To build your Studio for production locally, run the following command in the Studio project folder:

# For Studios initiated with the Sanity CLI
npm run build

# Alternative method
npx sanity build

The build command will bundle the Studio files into a dist folder by default. You can specify the production folder name (for example public) by passing it as a parameter:

# For Studios initiated with the Sanity CLI
npm run build -- public

# To build the Studio to a folder named "public"
npx sanity build public

This can be useful if your hosting provider requires a specific filename when you are self-hosting the Studio.

Preview a production build locally

To preview the local production build, you can run the following command:

npx sanity preview

# To specify the folder ("./public") for the production build
npx sanity preview public

This will run a local server for the production build of the Studio on http://localhost:3333.

Gotcha

It's easy to forget that any changes you make to the Studio files won't get reflected when running the preview of the production build. To enable hot-module reloading, you have to run npm run dev or npx sanity dev.

Customizing the built-in Vite configuration

To extend or change the built-in Vite configuration, you need a configuration file for the Sanity CLI. Let's say you want to alias your root folder to enable relative imports like import CustomComponent from '@/components/CustomComponent'. The following code examples show you how you can overwrite certain properties in the Studio's Vite configuration to do so:

// sanity.cli.js
import {defineCliConfig} from 'sanity/cli'

export default defineCliConfig({
  api: {
    // the rest of the config...
  },
  vite: {
    resolve: {
      alias: {
        '@': __dirname,
      },
    }
  },
})

You can learn more about configuring Vite in their documentation.

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