Babel support

In most of my projects that are not performance critical I am using Babel. Just tried out nexe on one of these projects but it has issues at least with ES7 syntax, e.g. module.exports = async function (cmdArgs) {.

The file that I am building has babel defined as follows:

//run.js
require('babel/register')({
  experimental: true,
  loose: true
});

var nodegitFile = require('./nodegit');

nodegitFile(['tests/fixtures/example.txt']);

and running node run.js works fine.

The error I am getting on nexe -i run.js is:

----> bundle project/blame-history/run.js
events.js:141
      throw er; // Unhandled 'error' event
            ^
Error: Parsing file project/blame-history/nodegit.js: Unexpected token (5:23)
    at Deps.parseDeps (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/index.js:418:28)
    at fromSource (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/index.js:361:48)
    at /Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/index.js:356:17
    at ConcatStream.<anonymous> (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/node_modules/concat-stream/index.js:32:43)
    at emitNone (events.js:72:20)
    at ConcatStream.emit (events.js:163:7)
    at finishMaybe (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/node_modules/concat-stream/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:460:14)
    at endWritable (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/node_modules/concat-stream/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:469:3)
    at ConcatStream.Writable.end (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/node_modules/concat-stream/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_writable.js:436:5)
    at Transform.onend (/Users/markus/npm/lib/node_modules/nexe/node_modules/module-deps/node_modules/readable-stream/lib/_stream_readable.js:523:10)

Any chance to get nexe to support Babel?

[defunctzombie]

For anyone else that stumbles here wondering how to package up newer js here is an approach that will work.

tl;dr; use webpack to create a single js file and package that with nexe

Use webpack to create a single js file starting from some entry point.

Below is a webpack.config.js that I used.

const webpack = require('webpack');

module.exports = {
    entry: ['babel-polyfill', './cli.js'],
    output: {
        path: "/tmp",
        filename: 'build.js',
    },
    target: 'node',
    plugins: [
        new webpack.optimize.DedupePlugin(),
        new webpack.optimize.OccurenceOrderPlugin(),
        new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin(),
    ],
    module: {
        loaders: [{
            test: /\.jsx?$/,
            exclude: /node_modules/,
            loader: 'babel',
            query: {
                plugins: [
                    'transform-class-properties',
                    'transform-async-to-generator',
                    'transform-object-rest-spread',
                ],
                presets: ['es2015'],
            },
        }, {
            test: /\.json$/,
            loader: 'json',
        }],
    },
};

You will need to ensure you have the correct dependencies in your package.json. Here is an example from mine.

{
  "name": "bagstore-cli",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "dependencies": {
    "ansi": "0.3.1",
    "babel-cli": "6.9.0",
    "babel-core": "6.9.0",
    "babel-loader": "6.2.4",
    "babel-plugin-transform-async-to-generator": "6.8.0",
    "babel-plugin-transform-class-properties": "6.9.0",
    "babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs": "6.8.0",
    "babel-plugin-transform-object-rest-spread": "6.8.0",
    "babel-preset-es2015": "6.9.0",
    "commander": "2.9.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "memory-fs": "0.3.0",
    "webpack": "1.13.1"
  },
}

In my case cli.js was my entrypoint. Webpack will “follow” your import or require expressions and you will end up with a single file /tmp/build.js which is all of the code for your CLI app packaged up in a single js file.

With the above config file, run the webpack CLI command per usual. It will produce /tmp/build.js which is your entire app as a single js file suitable for running with node. (i.e. node /tmp/build.js to test it).

I have not taken the step to actually package it with nexe (since having a single JS file was good enough for my use case) but it should be relatively straight forward to do so with the final js file.

[calebboyd]

Bundling is decoupled from nexe in nexe@beta