babel-loader

Turn ES6 code into vanilla ES5 with no runtime required using babel;

Install

$ npm install --save-dev babel-loader

Usage

import Animal from 'babel!./Animal.js';

class Person extends Animal {
  constructor(arg='default') {
    this.eat = 'Happy Meal';
  }
}

export default Person;

var Person = require('babel!./Person.js').default;
new Person();

Or within the webpack config:

module: {
    loaders: [
        { test: /\.js$/, exclude: /node_modules/, loader: 'babel-loader'}
    ]
}

and then import normally:

import Person from './Person.js';

Troubleshooting

babel-loader is slow!

Make sure you are transforming as few files as possible. Because you are probably matching /\.js$/, you might be transforming the node_modules folder or other unwanted source. See the exclude option in the loaders config as documented above.

babel is injecting helpers into each file and bloating my code!

babel uses very small helpers for common functions such as _extend. By default this will be added to every file that requires it.

You can instead require the babel runtime as a separate module to avoid the duplication.

The following configuration disables automatic per-file runtime injection in babel, instead requiring babel-runtime and making all helper references use it.

See the docs for more information.

NOTE: You must run npm install babel-runtime --save to include this in your project.

loaders: [
  // the optional 'runtime' transformer tells babel to require the runtime instead of inlining it.
  { test: /\.jsx?$/, exclude: /node_modules/, loader: 'babel-loader?experimental&optional=runtime' }
]

Options

See the babel options

This loader also supports the following loader-specific option:

• cacheDirectory: When set, the given directory will be used to cache the results of the loader. Future webpack builds will attempt to read from the cache to avoid needing to run the potentially expensive Babel recompilation process on each run. A value of true will cause the loader to use the default OS temporary file directory.

License

MIT © Luis Couto