Cannot exclude public assets

[everdrone]

Describe the bug

I am deploying a vitepress app with cloudflare workers and the images will be hosted on cloudflare R2.
I tried adding this to the config

  vite: {
    build: {
      rollupOptions: {
        external: /^\/media\//,
      },
    },
  },

to exclude all paths starting with /media/.

But in a test page containing

![alt](/media/remote-image.png)

The build fails trying to process the asset:

✖ rendering pages...
build error:
Cannot find module '/media/remote-image.png'

Reproduction

add an image ![alt](/media/remote-image.png) and mark all imports starting with /media/ as external:

export default defineConfig({
  vite: {
    build: {
      rollupOptions: {
        external: /^\/media\//,
      },
    },
  },
});

Expected behavior

All excluded assets will be ignored during the build process and included as plain urls.

<img alt="alt" src="/media/remote-image.png" />

System Info

System:
    OS: macOS 15.7
    CPU: (8) arm64 Apple M3
    Memory: 213.20 MB / 16.00 GB
    Shell: 5.9 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.17.0 - /Users/everdrone/.local/state/fnm_multishells/42219_1760630691922/bin/node
    npm: 10.9.2 - /Users/everdrone/.local/state/fnm_multishells/42219_1760630691922/bin/npm
    pnpm: 10.11.1 - /Users/everdrone/Library/pnpm/pnpm
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 141.0.7390.78
    Firefox: 144.0
    Safari: 26.0.1
  npmPackages:
    vitepress: ^1.6.4 => 1.6.4

Additional context

No response

Validations

• Check if you're on the latest VitePress version.
• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.

[brc-dd]

Hmm, the issue is that vue will transform it to import and during SSR the import will fail even if it's externalized because node won't be able to resolve it. I don't think there is any way except to use absolute paths or dynamic paths so that import doesn't get generated in first place:

<img :src="'/media/remote-image.png'" alt="foo">

Or if you want to completely disable the behavior, then this would work too:

import { defineConfig } from 'vitepress';

export default defineConfig({
  vue: { // https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-vue/tree/main/packages/plugin-vue#asset-url-handling
    template: {
      transformAssetUrls: false,
    },
  },
});

[everdrone]

Thank you for the fast response.

Are there drawbacks in using transformAssetUrls: false other than build-time checking if there are any missing assets?

[brc-dd]

Are there drawbacks in using transformAssetUrls: false other than build-time checking if there are any missing assets?

It will disable copying assets (images, videos, etc.) to dist. Use it only if you want to serve all your assets from the public directory or external services.