react-native: [Discussion] Upgrade to Babel 6 breaks parts of the package ecosystem
With the upgrade to Babel 6, two things changed:
- Babel or the packager appears to be looking at .babelrc in each npm package. When libraries like Redux publish a .babelrc for Babel 5 (ex: with the “stage” field), Babel 6 throws a TransformError.
- Babel appears to not apply the .babelrc of the project root to each npm package, even if they don’t contain .babelrc files
Before, you could configure .babelrc in your project root and Babel would compute something like the union of .babelrc + the options passed to transform(), and it would apply all those options to everything under node_modules. But now it seems not to apply the options specified in .babelrc to each npm package, so perhaps each package needs to ship with its own .babelrc and list its plugins in the package.json dependencies.
cc @sebmck you’re probably the best person to comment on the state of things
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: closed
- Created 9 years ago
- Comments: 20 (14 by maintainers)
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Commits related to this issue
- Add .babelrc to .npmignore Latest versions of react-native use Babel 6, which tries to read the options from .babelrc in the installed reindex-js package and fails because it has options for Babel 5.... — committed to reindexio/reindex-js by fson 9 years ago
- Add .babelrc to .npmignore for React Native compatibility As discussed here: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/4062 , having .babelrc publish to NPM conflicts with parent projects that ... — committed to lelandrichardson/react-pure-render by lelandrichardson 8 years ago
- Add .babelrc to .npmignore for React Native compatibility As discussed here: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/4062 , having .babelrc publish to NPM conflicts with parent projects that ... — committed to lelandrichardson/redux-immutable-state-invariant by lelandrichardson 8 years ago
- ignore .babelrc on publish see: https://github.com/loggur/react-redux-provide/issues/17 https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/4062#issuecomment-179944792 — committed to audionerd/redux-api-middleware by audionerd 8 years ago
- Ignore .babelrc through .npmignore to fix issue with react-native packager The react-native packager searches through all directories and parses .babelrc config files if it finds any. This breaks the... — committed to ZauberNerd/react-native-mock by ZauberNerd 8 years ago
- Use separate .babelrc file — committed to remix-run/history by mjackson 8 years ago
- move babel config to .babelrc and don't pubish to npm (react-native) ref: https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/4062 — committed to dvajs/dva by sorrycc 8 years ago
- Remove .babelrc from the published package Installed from npm, this package doesn't work with React Native, because although the released code is transpiled, .baberc is also published to npm. Fixed ... — committed to fson/redux-optimist by fson 8 years ago
- Ignore .babelrc through .npmignore to fix issue with react-native packager The react-native packager searches through all directories and parses .babelrc config files if it finds any. This breaks the... — committed to andrey-skl/react-native-mock by ZauberNerd 8 years ago
- remove .babelrc for compatibility with react native https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/4062 — committed to Baqend/js-sdk by kddc 7 years ago
The solution that I think we’ve standardized on is asking library authors to exclude .babelrc files from their npm packages, and the message has percolated through the ecosystem by now.
There are times when you want to transpile things in node_modules, but this should be done under the assumption that the code in node_modules is pure, standards compliant JavaScript code. It should not make use of .babelrc files, and it should not add strict mode if the file wasn’t already in strict mode. Running babel in its default mode on node_modules is highly risky and should be avoided. Having the ability to run carefully chosen transforms against node_modules may be useful in the future, but it is a pretty specialised use case.
One temporary workaround would be, to delete all
.babelrcfiles in the npm postinstall hook,Processing npm modules with babel is a bug and will break many packages. This is not how any of the rest of the node.js/JavaScript ecosystem operates. This problem exclusively affects react-native.