transcompileES6toES5.md

Cheat Sheet for Transcompiling JavaScript ES6 to ES5 with Babel

1. From your main directory, initialize in shell with npm init. This will ask some questions to describe the project, as well as create a package.json file.

2. Create a directory for original .js code called src

3. Install babel dependencies. Side note: After running these commands, the dependencies will be added to the devDependencies property in package.json.

npm install babel-cli -D
npm install babel-preset-env -D

4. Create a .babelrc file (touch .babelrc) and insert this text into it:

{
  "presets": ["env"]
}

4. Add the following key-value pair to the scripts object in package.json. By the way, do not forget to add a comma between this and any other key-value pairs in the script object.

"build": "babel src -d lib"

5. Run npm run build to transcompile your code from src (original ES6 code). The resulting ES5 code will be in the lib directory.