Window is not defined error when upgrading @vitejs/plugin-react to 5.0.3 or later

[mtmacdonald]

Related plugins

• plugin-react

• plugin-react-swc

• plugin-react-oxc

• plugin-rsc

Describe the bug

When upgrading from @vitejs/plugin-react version 5.0.2 to 5.0.3, I started getting an error in my build:

ReferenceError: window is not defined @react-refresh:599:1
@react-refresh:599

I'm stuck on the old version for now. Is it possible to please check if this is a regression bug, or something I need to fix/workaround in my project, and if so, any tips?

Thank you!

Reproduction

https://github.com/mtmacdonald/docgen

Steps to reproduce

To reproduce

• check out master branch in github.com/mtmacdonald/docgen
• upgrade @vitejs/plugin-react to 5.0.3 or later in package.json
• yarn install
• yarn dev:docs
• load URL http://localhost:5173/pdf
• see the error in the browser console

System Info

System:
    OS: macOS 26.2
    CPU: (12) arm64 Apple M2 Pro
    Memory: 152.05 MB / 32.00 GB
    Shell: 5.9 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.19.0 - /Users/mark/.nvm/versions/node/v22.19.0/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.22 - /Users/mark/.nvm/versions/node/v22.19.0/bin/yarn
    npm: 10.9.3 - /Users/mark/.nvm/versions/node/v22.19.0/bin/npm
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 143.0.7499.193
    Firefox: 136.0.4
    Firefox Developer Edition: 147.0
    Safari: 26.2
  npmPackages:
    @vitejs/plugin-react: 5.0.3 => 5.0.3
    rolldown-vite: ^7.3.1 => 7.1.0

Used Package Manager

yarn

Logs

ReferenceError: window is not defined @react-refresh:599:1
@react-refresh:599

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.

[ArnaudBarre]

It's kind a bad interaction between a breaking change of 5.0 which remove node_modules from the default exclude and #872 which made the plugin process the react-pdf.browser-{hash}.js chunk 😬

The fix is this in src/generate/generate.ts:

-       exclude: /\/src\/app\/pdf\//,
+       exclude: [/\/src\/app\/pdf\//, /\/node_modules\//],

Because Vite doesn't expect plugins to process bundled dependencies, after this change you will need to reload the browser page with cache disabled :/

I've updated the doc in #1046 because it's not obvious to catch this

[mtmacdonald]

That really helped, much appreciated!