BabelJS

Created: 2018-06-13 11:53:11 -0700 Modified: 2018-12-07 09:04:23 -0800

Troubleshooting

Globs don’t use the right working directory / “base” directory

I was trying to do something like this:

npx babel src/* src/**/* --out-dir dist

However, it was producing dist/src/foo.js instead of dist/foo.js. There are a couple of solutions:

In this specific case, since I wanted every single file under “src”, I could just have avoided globs altogether and specified “babel src —out-dir dist”.
If globs are needed, then you have to be in the directory that you want as the “base”, so your command would change to this:

cd src && babel ./* ./**/* --out-dir ../dist

Spread operator problem

The problem is described here. It’s going to be fixed in Babel 7, so if you run into a situation where you can’t use the spread operator, then just stop using the spread operator or upgrade to version 7 (if you can).

Unexpected token import

This probably just means you’re missing a .babelrc file if you’re trying to use babel-register:

{
  // Note: this entire file only exists so that babel-register works
  "compact": false,
  "presets": [
    [
      "env",
      {
        "targets": {
          "node": "current"
        }
      }
    ]
  ]
}