Environment

Nuxt: 4.4.8
Package manager: npm 10 (not reproducible with pnpm)
Node: 22.22.0
OS: macOS 25

Reproduction

Minimal repro: https://github.com/DenisLug/nuxt-layers-reproduction

cd nuxt-layers-reproduction/main
npm install --ignore-scripts
npm run build

Describe the bug

The build results in the following error:

[nitro]  ERROR  RollupError: node_modules/nuxt-first-level-layer/node_modules/nuxt-second-level-layer/server/api/inner.ts (4:10):
  Expected ';', '}' or <eof> (Note that you need plugins to import files that are not JavaScript)

  4: interface Payload { from: 'inner-layer'; ok: true }
                ^

Additional context

I traced the issue to this regex: https://github.com/nuxt/nuxt/blob/main/packages/nitro-server/src/index.ts#L39

It only surfaces under the following conditions:

• npm - pnpm is unaffected because its virtual store layout matches PNPM_NODE_MODULES_RE, which is already greedy.
• TypeScript files under a layer's server/ directory. These are the files Nitro hands to esbuild, which the buggy exclude pattern then skips.

A possible fix would be to make NODE_MODULES_RE greedy up to the last node_modules/, mirroring the pnpm variant:

const NODE_MODULES_RE = /.*\/node_modules\/(.+)$/

I'm not deep enough in this codebase to be confident that's the right call across all the layer-resolution edge cases, so I'll leave the final decision to a maintainer with broader context.

Logs