Babel ❤ NPM

Once you go ES6, you never go back ;) In order to create ES5-backwards-compatible modules, there's are a few nuances that you need to be aware of:

babelify

Transpiling your NPM modules to ES5 with babel will allow them to work in a wide variety of environments. Add a prepublish script to your package.json's scripts block to automate this when you run npm publish. By convention /lib is a good place to output your ES5 artefacts to, and it's a good idea to produce a clean build each time (with the rimraf module providing a cross platform implementation of rm -rf, windows users will thank you.)

/package.json

{
  "name": "my_pkg",
  "scripts": {
    "prepublish": "rimraf lib && babel --out-dir lib src"
  }
}

main

Traditionally your index.js file would reside in the root of your module (this is where NPM will look for it by default); however as we are going to transpile to ES5 you'll want to put your index file, and all other ES6 sources under /src.

Your package.json's main block should point to the transpiled index.js file in the /lib folder. If you're feeling adventurous you incude a jsnext:main block and point to to your ES6 entry point.

/package.json

{
  "name": "my_pkg",
  "main": "lib/index.js",
  "jsnext:main": "src/index.js"
}

Mocha

Mocha does the job well and it's easy to configure for use with babel; just give it a --compilers flag when you invoke it:

/package.json

{
  "name": "my_pkg",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "mocha --compilers js:babel/register --recursive"
  }
}

.npmignore

This one tripped me up; when I published my first NPM modules which made use of babel (redux-action-side-effects) my /lib folder wasn't included in the final archived vended by NPM. Turns out that NPM will automatically exclude everything in your .gitignore file (and as the /lib folder contains build artefacts I excluded it from source control). To override this add a /.npmignore file:

/.npmignore

# If this file is not present the contents of .gitignore are used
/.gitignore

Happy npm publishing!