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Notes on upgrading to Babel 7

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After a long time, Babel 7 has been released. If you use Babel at all, it's important to do the following things to make sure you're good to go:

  • Make sure that the project's package.json file points to the right version of Babel

  • If you use yearly presets (ES2015 / ES2017) or the latest preset change to using preset-env

    • The yearly presets have been deprecated and will be removed in future versions of Babel
    • Preset-env produces a smaller transpiled file by only transpiling what's needed for your target browsers

  • Note that all packages for version 7 have been scoped. This will require you to rename your Babel packages

    • babel-core is now @babel/core
    • babel-cli changed to @babel/cli
    • Safe bet is to replace babel- with @babel/

To make sure that you didn't miss anything, you can run babel-upgrade which will automate some of the tasks we discussed... it helps to know what the automated tool does before the tool does it and, potentially, break things in unexpected ways.

You have two way to install babel-upgrade

  • Install globally and run
npm install babel-upgrade -g
babel-upgrade --write
  • Install it as dev-dependency and run it with npx (NPM 5.2 and later)
npm i -D babel-upgrade
npx babel-upgrade --write

See babel-upgrade's README for more detailed instructions.

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