fix: babel-plugin-react-compiler cannot be imported when used in a framework

[smeng9]

Description

I am a meta-framework developer that my library incorporates vite's javascript api.
My library is a cli based tool, calls vite's build() function internally, and processes user files.
It is supposed to be able to run regardless of whether there is a local node_module folder in the user's cwd.

I encountered the following issue issue

@rolldown/plugin-babel calls babel.loadOptionsAsync with { babelrc: false, configFile: false }. When there is no config file, Babel uses process.cwd() as the dirname for resolving plugins in programmatic presets — not the directory of the file being transformed.

reactCompilerPreset at @vitejs/plugin-react/dist/index.js:46 returns:
preset: () => ({ plugins: [["babel-plugin-react-compiler", options]] })
// ^ bare string, not a pre-resolved absolute path

Babel must then locate babel-plugin-react-compiler via:
import.meta.resolve("babel-plugin-react-compiler",
pathToFileURL(path.join(process.cwd(), "babel-virtual-resolve-base.js")).href)

When process.cwd() is a directory that doesn't have babel-plugin-react-compiler in its node_modules ancestry — e.g., / (the Docker container default) — the resolution fails.

It needs to ensure Babel receive an absolute path, so it never needs to do CWD-relative resolution

[ArnaudBarre]

In your setup, if there is no node_modules, where is located the code for the react compiler plugin?

[smeng9]

Hi @ArnaudBarre

My tool is supposed to be installed using npm install -g, it will be installed into npm root -g location.

That means, in a docker node environment, if I run my tool with the cwd as /, it cannot find the babel-plugin-react-compiler from /, but the babel-plugin-react-compiler is indeed installed at the global node_modules.

[ArnaudBarre]

Ok thanks for the clarification I see. @sapphi-red what's your opinion on us doing the resolve of babel plugin instead of Babel? We are doing this for SWC but I looked at the PR dropping Babel and we didn't for the Babel plugins

[sapphi-red]

I think we should have been doing it given that babel-plugin-react-compiler is a peer dep of plugin-react.