env is hardcoded to "production" which causes React v17 to fail building properly

Author: jasonwilliamsCreated Nov 30, 2020Updated Jun 16, 2026
Labelsbughelp wantedgood first issue

Current behavior

I think there's a mismatch of environment variables being read by babel (JSX config) and Styleguidist, causing some issues deeper down.

(I've noticed this was raised before but was closed)

So the issue is. My webpack config has mode set to "production" (because mode comes from env) and anything else that uses NODE_ENV will see developement.

I ended up with this error: ReferenceError: _jsx is not defined.

I don't know why its hardcoded to production regardless of what you set, but it seems to be the cause of this bug.

Potential Fix https://github.com/styleguidist/react-styleguidist/blob/master/src/scripts/make-webpack-config.ts#L29 should be

javascript
env = process.env.NODE_ENV || env

https://github.com/styleguidist/react-styleguidist/blob/master/src/scripts/build.ts#L9 should also default to 'development' instead of 'production'

Source: styleguidist/react-styleguidist