babel-standalone

babel-standalone

babel-standalone is a standalone build of Babel for use in non-Node.js environments, including browsers. It's bundled with all the standard Babel plugins and presets.

But why?!

It's true that using Babel through Webpack, Browserify or Gulp should be sufficient for most use cases. However, there are some valid use cases for babel-standalone:

• Sites like JSFiddle, JS Bin, the REPL on the Babel site, etc. These sites compile user-provided JavaScript in real-time.
• Apps that embed a JavaScript engine such as V8 directly, and want to use Babel for compilation
• Apps that want to use JavaScript as a scripting language for extending the app itself, including all the goodies that ES2015 provides.
• Integration of Babel into a non-Node.js environment (ReactJS.NET, ruby-babel-transpiler, php-babel-transpiler, etc).

Installation

babel-standalone can be installed via NPM:

npm install --save babel-standalone

Or grab babel.js and/or babel.min.js from the GitHub releases page

Usage

Load babel.js or babel.min.js in your environment. This will expose Babel's API in a Babel object:

var input = 'const getMessage = () => "Hello World";';
var output = Babel.transform(input, { presets: ['es2015'] }).code;

Note that .babelrc doesn't work in babel-standalone, as no file system access is available. The presets and/or plugins to use must be specified in the options passed to Babel.transform.