babel-preset-node5

Babel 6.x presets for Node 5.x (updated regularly!)

Node 5.x brings ~59% native ES6/ES2015 coverage. This preset for Babel 6 attempts to bridge the gap for the much of the remaining 41% using Babel plug-ins.

Motivation

Babel 6.x is awesome, but simply including the ES2015 preset means you're transpiling features that your Node 5.x installation can already do faster and natively, replacing them with inferior / old code.

This preset complements existing V8-native functionality - it doesn't work around it.

The end result is nearly always a faster build and script execution time.

Key features:

• Flow support (removes types) via babel-plugin-transform-flow-strip-types
• Strict mode, to enable Classes and let (via babel-plugin-transform-strict-mode)
• CommonJS import/export module syntax (babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs)
• Destructuring (via babel-plugin-transform-es2015-destructuring)
• Default and rest parameters (via babel-plugin-transform-es2015-parameters)
• Sticky RegEx (via babel-plugin-transform-es2015-sticky-regex)
• Unicode RegEx (via babel-plugin-transform-es2015-unicode-regex)

Note: This package originally shipped with the React preset, but to avoid bloat, doesn't any longer. If you want to add that, please install babel-preset-react too

Usage instructions

Installation

Install via NPM the usual way:

npm i babel-preset-node5

Usage

Via .babelrc (recommended)

Create a .babelrc file in your project root, and include 'node5' in your preset path:

{
  "presets": [
    "node5"
  ]
}

Now whenever you run babel-node, it will polyfill your app with the ES2015 features that Node 5 is missing.

Via CLI

$ babel script.js --presets node5

Via Node API

require("babel-core").transform("code", {
  presets: ["node5"]
});

Webpack, Gulp, Browserify, etc

Follow vendor instructions and include node5 in your babel "preset" list.

How to add React support

Babel has a ready-made preset for React, and you now need to install it separately.

Just grab it via NPM:

npm i babel-preset-react

And then add it to your "presets" list in .babelrc:

{
  "presets": [
    "node5",
    "react"
  ]
}

No longer tracking Babel 6 versions

This package originally tracked Babel 6.x versioning. The problem is, many of the plug-ins and transforms provided by Babel don't always track the the babel-core version, so updating one dependency can throw the versioning schema off.

This package will instead now follow its own semver, starting (arbitrarily) at v10.0.0.

I'm using this repo in production, so you can be assured that I'm making it a priority to update Babel 6 deps regularly and track the latest plug-in versions.