Support Transitive deps in `virtual:vite-rsc/client-references`

[fuma-nama]

Related plugins

• plugin-react

• plugin-react-swc

• plugin-rsc

Describe the bug

In a monorepo, when pkg-a imports & uses pkg-b in a server component, the pkg-b is imported in virtual:vite-rsc/client-references.

When the main workspace/app only installs pkg-a, it will fail with module resolution error like:

Error: [vite+]: Rolldown failed to resolve import "pkg-b" from "virtual:vite-rsc/client-references".
This is most likely unintended because it can break your application at runtime.
If you do want to externalize this module explicitly add it to
`build.rolldownOptions.external`

I checked prior issues like #826 and https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react/blob/main/packages/plugin-rsc/docs/architecture.md, not sure if this is intentional, but I think it's not a design flaw, it's possible to resolve directly to a transitive dep, the error only happens because Vite failed to resolve the transitive dep from workspace.

Currently, it will require a consumer to install all transitive deps of pkg-a as long as they'll be included in client-references, but this purely depends on how pkg-a uses its transitive deps, consumer has no control/awareness of this. It is adding a lot more complexity to consume RSC-native packages/libraries, I found it very difficult to do without making a custom Vite plugin to workaround this (but very fragile).

I have fixed this with a Vite plugin that simply hook on resolveId(), and replace it with the full resolved path of module. Would be great if the RSC plugin can use a similar strategy to prevent issues with transitive deps.

You can see my original fix here: https://github.com/fuma-nama/fumapress/blob/3998fcbd618d8d66faed4154a63fa7d93687c548/packages/core/src/vite.ts#L77

Reproduction

see fuma-nama/fumapress#39

Steps to reproduce

Although not a direct illustration, this is the original issue from Fumapress:

1. Open a monorepo.
2. pnpm create fumapress@0.0.14, include the created project as a workspace of monorepo.
3. pnpm build on the workspace.

It should error on @fuma-translate/react, this is a transitive dependency of fumapress/fumadocs (declared in their package.json), in the context of pkg-a/pkg-b, pkg-a refers to Fumapress & pkg-b refers to @fuma-translate/react.

System Info

System:
    OS: macOS 15.7.1
    CPU: (12) arm64 Apple M3 Pro
    Memory: 101.55 MB / 18.00 GB
    Shell: 5.9 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 24.15.0 - /Users/xred/.nvm/versions/node/v24.15.0/bin/node
    npm: 11.16.0 - /Users/xred/.nvm/versions/node/v24.15.0/bin/npm
    pnpm: 11.1.1 - /Users/xred/.nvm/versions/node/v24.15.0/bin/pnpm
    bun: 1.3.14 - /Users/xred/.nvm/versions/node/v24.15.0/bin/bun
  Browsers:
    Safari: 18.6
  npmPackages:
    vite: ^8.0.16 => 8.0.16

Used Package Manager

npm

Logs

No response

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]

Thanks for the report. It looks like Tanstack start also hit the same issue in TanStack/router#7589

While this wasn't intended, the complete support seems difficult especially for dev where we are relying on the trick of not resolving package import inside plugin intentionally. I will see what can be improved still.