What is ember-cli-babel?
ember-cli-babel is an Ember CLI addon that provides Babel transpilation for Ember.js applications. It allows developers to use the latest JavaScript features by transpiling ES6+ code to ES5, ensuring compatibility with older browsers.
What are ember-cli-babel's main functionalities?
Transpile ES6+ to ES5
This feature allows you to transpile modern JavaScript (ES6+) to ES5, making your code compatible with older browsers. The code sample shows how to configure ember-cli-babel in an Ember CLI project to include the Babel polyfill.
module.exports = function(defaults) {
let app = new EmberApp(defaults, {
'ember-cli-babel': {
includePolyfill: true
}
});
return app.toTree();
};
Custom Babel Plugins
You can add custom Babel plugins to your Ember CLI project. The code sample demonstrates how to include the '@babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties' plugin.
module.exports = function(defaults) {
let app = new EmberApp(defaults, {
babel: {
plugins: ['@babel/plugin-proposal-class-properties']
}
});
return app.toTree();
};
Custom Babel Presets
This feature allows you to use custom Babel presets in your Ember CLI project. The code sample shows how to include the '@babel/preset-env' preset.
module.exports = function(defaults) {
let app = new EmberApp(defaults, {
babel: {
presets: ['@babel/preset-env']
}
});
return app.toTree();
};
Other packages similar to ember-cli-babel
babel-loader
babel-loader is a webpack loader that allows you to transpile JavaScript files using Babel and webpack. It is similar to ember-cli-babel in that it enables the use of modern JavaScript features, but it is used in the context of a webpack build process rather than an Ember CLI project.
gulp-babel
gulp-babel is a Gulp plugin that allows you to use Babel to transpile your JavaScript files. Like ember-cli-babel, it helps you write modern JavaScript while ensuring compatibility with older browsers. However, it is used within a Gulp build system instead of Ember CLI.
rollup-plugin-babel
rollup-plugin-babel is a Rollup plugin that integrates Babel into the Rollup bundler. It provides similar functionality to ember-cli-babel by allowing you to transpile modern JavaScript code, but it is used within a Rollup build process.
ember-cli-babel
This Ember-CLI plugin uses Babel to allow you to use ES6 syntax with your
Ember-CLI project.
Installation
npm install --save-dev ember-cli-babel
Usage
This plugin should work without any configuration after installing. By default it will take every .js
file
in your project and run it through the Babel transpiler to convert the ES6 code to ES5. Running existing ES5 code
through the transpiler shouldn't change the code at all (likely just a format change if it does).
If you need to customize the way that Babel transforms your code, you can do it by passing in any of the options
found here. Example:
var app = new EmberApp({
babel: {
comments: false,
blacklist: [
'es6.arrowFunctions',
'regenerator'
]
}
});
Polyfill
Babel comes with a polyfill that includes a custom regenerator runtime
and core.js. Many transformations will work without it, but for full support you
must include the polyfill in your app. The Babel feature tour includes a note for
features that require the polyfill to work.
To include it in your app, pass includePolyfill: true
in your ember-cli-babel
options.
Features
Out of the box without a polyfill the following ES6 features are enabled:
Feature | Supported |
---|
Arrows and Lexical This | YES |
Classes | YES |
Enhanced Object Literals | YES |
Template Strings | YES |
Destructuring | YES |
Default + Rest + Spread | YES |
Let + Const | YES |
Iterators + For..Of | NO |
Generators | NO |
Comprehensions | YES |
Unicode | YES |
Modules | YES |
Module Loaders | NO |
Map + Set + WeakMap + WeakSet | NO |
Proxies | NO |
Symbols | NO |
Subclassable Built-ins | PARTIAL |
Math + Number + String + Object APIs | NO |
Binary and Octal Literals | PARTIAL |
Promises | NO |
Reflect API | NO |
Tail Calls | PARTIAL |
See the Babel docs for more details
About Modules
Ember-CLI uses its own ES6 module transpiler for the custom Ember resolver that it uses. Because of that,
this plugin disables Babel module compilation by blacklisting that transform. If you find that you want to use
the Babel module transform instead of the Ember-CLI one, you'll have to explicitly set compileModules
to true
in your configuration. If compileModules
is anything other than true
, this plugin will leave the module
syntax compilation up to Ember-CLI.