webpack with babel6 and react

In this post we will walk through the basic setup to make babel6 work with webpack. Assuming you have installed webpack. On a high level, Babel has the following architecture. Click on the image to see the enlarged version of it.

Install core modules & Add the webpack config to parse the .js | .jsx files with babel loader

npm i --save-dev babel-loader
npm i --save-dev babel-core

// webpack.config.js

module: {
  loaders: [
    { test: /.js|.jsx$/, exclude: /node_modules/, loader: "babel-loader" }
  ]
}

Note: "babel-loader" or "babel" both refers to the same loader.

Add babel config to tell babel how to transform the parsed files

Presets are the array of plugins. Most frequently used presets with the react project are the following.

npm i --save-dev babel-preset-stage-2
npm i --save-dev babel-preset-react
npm i --save-dev babel-preset-es2015

//.babelrc

{
  "presets": [
    "es2015",
    "stage-2",
    "react"
  ]
}

react 5 es6 10 webpack 2 webdev 7 babel 2