React import line not injected in symlinked files

[y-nk]

Related plugins

• plugin-react

• plugin-react-swc

• plugin-react-oxc

• plugin-rsc

Describe the bug

i'm having a monorepo where i build a backend app and i need jsx/tsx to work to render emails. i've setup the email part as a lib package of my monorepo. the package is symlinked, included at the build and works great except for this one thing: tsx files are missing import * as React from 'react' and therefore the code breaks.

Reproduction

https://github.com/y-nk/repro-965

Steps to reproduce

git clone https://github.com/y-nk/repro-965
cd repro-xxxx
pnpm i
pnpm --filter="@test/app" build
cat app/dist/lib/src/email.js

the email file should be missing the React import line which is commonly injected otherwise.

System Info

System:
    OS: macOS 26.0.1
    CPU: (8) arm64 Apple M2
    Memory: 16.00 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.16.0
    pnpm: 10.13.1

Used Package Manager

pnpm

Notes

i have included a few elements of context (email rendering lib) to highlight that the usecase is strong, as well as why i'm using the swc version in the vite.config.

Validations

• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Make sure this is a Vite issue and not a framework-specific issue.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[hi-ogawa]

It looks like vite-plugin-node is affecting tsx transpilation. If I comment out tsCompiler: 'swc', output includes proper react/jsx-runtime transform:

      VitePluginNode({
        ...
        // tsCompiler: 'swc',
      }) : [],

Here is an output of app/dist/lib/src/email.js

import { jsx } from "react/jsx-runtime";
import { Html } from "@react-email/components";
const previewProps = {
  message: "hello world"
};
function Email(props = previewProps) {
  return /* @__PURE__ */ jsx(Html, { children: props.message });
}
export {
  Email as default
};

[y-nk]

@hi-ogawa with your plugin/vite knowledge, any chance you could put me in the direction of a fix? broad assumptions which could help me debug this on my own would be very much welcomed 🙏

[hi-ogawa]

I closed this since this is an issue of vite-plugin-node. Probably it's overriding Vite's tsx transpilation, so I'd suggest looking into https://github.com/axe-me/vite-plugin-node/.

From a quick look, the fix is either just remove tsCompiler or configure swcOptions like this

VitePluginNode({
  ...
  tsCompiler: 'swc',
  swcOptions: {
    jsc: {
      transform: {
        react: {
          runtime: 'automatic',
        },
      },
    },
  }
})

[y-nk]

@hi-ogawa yes thank you for closing the issue, it was indeed a vite-plugin-node issue. You were right from the start, and removing react-swc + adding options in vite-plugin-node as you mentioned did the trick.

I wonder if a plugin can use another plugin, so that this one could reuse react-swc to avoid this issue. i'm not sure dependencies between plugin is a feature of vite.

but thank you nonetheless.