Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

Plugins and presets

Plugins tell Babel how to transform your code, and presets are predefined groups of plugins. For example, you have the es2017 preset, which includes the plugins syntax-trailing-function-commas and transform-async-to-generator, which are required to support ECMAScript 2017 syntax. There's also the react preset, which includes the transform-react-jsx plugin (among others) to allow Babel to understand JSX.

To use a plugin or preset, you can install it as a development dependency, and specify it in the .babelrc. For example, if I want to support ECMAScript 2017 syntax, but also the rest and spread operators for objects (a ES2018 feature), I could run the following:

$ yarn add @babel/preset-es2017 @babel/plugin-syntax-object-rest-spread ...