Turbopack Is Officially Production Ready

Vercel has announced that Turbopack is officially production-ready in Next.js. The Rust-based bundler is designed to replace Webpack, providing faster local development and production build times.

This marks the culmination of a multi-year effort to improve developer tooling speed.

Up to 10x Faster Development Starts

Turbopack leverages a caching system written in Rust. It caches compile results at a granular level, so it only rechecks code that has changed.

This reduces the time required to spin up local development servers.

For larger projects, start times have dropped from over 15 seconds to under 2 seconds.

Parity with Webpack Features

Achieving production readiness required matching Webpack's feature set. The team spent months ensuring compatibility with custom CSS configurations, image optimization, and font loaders.

This means most Next.js projects can switch to Turbopack without changing their config files.

You can enable it by adding the --turbo flag to your dev script inside the package configuration:

// package.json script configuration
{
  "name": "my-app",
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "next dev --turbo",
    "build": "next build",
    "start": "next start"
  }
}

This simple update activates the Rust engine out-of-the-box.

The Future of Rust-Based Tooling

The transition to Turbopack is part of a broader trend of rewriting web build tools in system languages. By moving away from JavaScript-based bundlers, build steps become significantly faster.

This allows developers to spend less time waiting for compilers and more time writing application code.