Recent outbreaks of infectious diseases, such as the middle east respiratory syndrome, Zika infection, Ebola hemorrhagic fever, and Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pose significant challenges on the rapid development of efficacious vaccines. Virus-vectored vaccines, as an important new vaccine, can be administrated noninvasively through aerosol inhalation or oral administration, which could stimulate humoral, cellular, and mucosal immune responses without the need for adjuvants, showing good immunogenicity and safety in clinical trials or in emergency use. With the deeper understanding of the viral genome and structural proteins, synthetic biology has enabled the design and modification of viruses to produce recombinant viral vector-based vaccines with high titer, safety, and immunogenicity, and such research has significant implications for the vaccine development. This review highlights major strategies employed in the construction of virus-vectored vaccines, including the construction method of replication-competent or replication-defective viral vectors, and the development of viral vectors commonly used in producing the recombinant vaccines. Among these viral vectors, replication-deficient adenovirus-based vectors with gene deletion in the E1 and E3 regions are most mature for use. Currently, adenoviral vectors that have been used in the approved recombinant vaccines include Ad5, Ad26 and ChAdOx1. Vesicular stomatitis virus and flavivirus with small genomes are negative-sense and positive-sense single-stranded RNA viruses, respectively, which are easy to prepare and more suitable for being used in developing recombinant vaccines with small antigen proteins. Poxviruses and herpesviruses have large genomes for high packing capacity, but they are most difficult to be modified with synthetic biology methods. Different viral vectors need to be prepared using different strategies, and consequently vaccines developed with these vectors have different immune effects. The construction strategies of different viral vector vaccines introduced in this review will provide valuable theoretical reference for the research and development of novel viral vector vaccines. In the future, virus-vectored vaccines will be iteratively developed for higher safety, stronger protection, better compliance and lower production cost.