canSkipBabel does not account for overrides, causing Babel to be skipped entirely

[gajus]

Related plugins

• plugin-react

• plugin-react-swc

• plugin-react-oxc

• plugin-rsc

Describe the bug

When configuring babel.overrides without any top-level plugins or presets, the canSkipBabel function incorrectly determines that Babel can be skipped. This causes override test functions/patterns to never be evaluated, and override plugins to never run.

The test callback is never invoked. No override plugins are applied.

https://github.com/vitejs/vite-plugin-react/blob/main/packages/plugin-react/src/index.ts#L563-L573

function canSkipBabel(
  plugins: ReactBabelOptions['plugins'],
  babelOptions: ReactBabelOptions,
) {
  return !(
    plugins.length ||
    babelOptions.presets.length ||
    babelOptions.configFile ||
    babelOptions.babelrc
  )
}

It does not check babelOptions.overrides.length. When overrides are the sole source of plugins, this function returns true and Babel is skipped.

This has two effects:

1. In configResolved (production builds or rolldown-vite), the entire transform handler is deleted via delete viteBabel.transform — Babel never runs.
2. In the per-file transform path, the early return at if (canSkipBabel(...)) return prevents Babel from processing the file.

Reproduction

https://

Steps to reproduce

react({
  babel: {
    overrides: [
      {
        plugins: ['babel-plugin-react-compiler'],
        test: /\+Page\.tsx?$/,
      },
      {
        plugins: ['babel-plugin-zod-hoist'],
        test: (filename) => {
          console.log('filename>>>', filename); // never fires
          return filename?.endsWith('.tsx') ?? false;
        },
      },
    ],
  },
}),

System Info

N/A

Used Package Manager

npm

Logs

No response

Validations

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• 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.
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• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

[ArnaudBarre]

We can probably add babelOptions.overrides.length check.
Out of curiosity, why do you have overrides without any plugins? (I never used the babel overrides option so I don't know its intent)

[gajus]

I want to apply Babel transformations only to parts of the project, that's what overrides without default plugins do.