Setting up babel, a beginners guide

babel.md

Setting up Babel

1. Install babel-cli and save it to your developer dependencies

npm i --save-dev babel-cli

2. Install a preset of your choice. Presets indicate which version of EcmaScript to use. The env preset is the most recent version.

npm i --save-dev babel-preset-env

3. Create a .babelrc file in the root of your project. The .babelrc file specifies which preset to use, along with any plugins or other configuration options.

A minimal .babelrc file looks like this:

{
  "preset": ["env"]
}

4. Install any plugins you wish to use. Plugins enable specific syntactic or language features. For example, to enable object spread, the following steps should be performed:

npm i --save-dev babel-plugin-transform-object-rest-spread

{
  "plugins": ["transform-object-rest-spread"],
  "presets": ["env"]
}

5. Add a build script to your package.json to transpile your JavaScript using babel. This example transpiles all .js files inside the src/ directory and outputs to lib/.

"scripts": {
  "build": "babel src -d lib",
},