babel-standalone is a standalone build of Babel for use in non-Node.js environments, including browsers. It's bundled with all the standard Babel plugins and presets.
It's true that using Babel through Webpack, Browserify or Gulp should be sufficient for most use cases. However, there are some valid use cases for babel-standalone:
- Sites like JSFiddle, JS Bin, the REPL on the Babel site, etc. These sites compile user-provided JavaScript in real-time.
- Apps that embed a JavaScript engine such as V8 directly, and want to use Babel for compilation
- Apps that want to use JavaScript as a scripting language for extending the app itself, including all the goodies that ES2015 provides.
- Integration of Babel into a non-Node.js environment (ReactJS.NET, ruby-babel-transpiler, php-babel-transpiler, etc).
There are several ways to get a copy of babel-standalone. Pick whichever one you like:
- Use it via CDNJS: https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/babel-standalone/6.10.3/babel.min.js. This is a simple way to embed it on a webpage without having to do any other setup.
- Install via Bower:
bower install babel-standalone - Install via NPM:
npm install --save babel-standalone - Manually grab
babel.jsand/orbabel.min.jsfrom the GitHub releases page. Every release includes these files.
Load babel.js or babel.min.js in your environment. This will expose Babel's API in a Babel object:
var input = 'const getMessage = () => "Hello World";';
var output = Babel.transform(input, { presets: ['es2015'] }).code;When loaded in a browser, babel-standalone will automatically compile and execute all script tags with text/babel type:
<div id="output"></div>
<!-- Load Babel -->
<script src="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/babel-standalone/6.10.3/babel.min.js"></script>
<!-- Your custom script here -->
<script type="text/babel">
const getMessage = () => "Hello World";
document.getElementById('output').innerHTML = getMessage();
</script>Note that .babelrc doesn't work in babel-standalone, as no file system access is available. The presets and/or plugins to use must be specified in the options passed to Babel.transform.