@module-federation/enhanced fails to resolve runtimePlugins package names

[dmchoi77]

Describe the bug

The @module-federation/enhanced documentation states that runtimePlugins supports package names.

However, with @module-federation/enhanced@2.8.1, using a package name as a runtimePlugins entry fails during the build. The package name is converted into a filesystem path relative to process.cwd() instead of being resolved using Node.js module resolution.

Configuration that fails:

runtimePlugins: [
  '@module-federation/inject-external-runtime-core-plugin',
],

Actual result:

Module not found: Error: Can't resolve
'<project-root>/@module-federation/inject-external-runtime-core-plugin'

The build succeeds when the package is passed through require.resolve():

runtimePlugins: [
  require.resolve('@module-federation/inject-external-runtime-core-plugin'),
],

A package name supplied to runtimePlugins should be resolved using Node.js package resolution and behave the same as the absolute path returned by require.resolve().

Reproduction

https://github.com/dmchoi77/enhanced-runtime-plugins-repro

Used Package Manager

pnpm

System Info

OS: macOS
Node.js: v22.22.0
pnpm: 10.28.0
Package: @module-federation/runtime-core@2.8.1

Validations

• Read the docs.
• Read the common issues list.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Make sure this is a Module federation issue and not a framework-specific issue.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.