What is Babel in React?
Installing Babel to use with React and JSX
How often is Babel used with React? Is it possible to use React without it?
Are Babel and Webpack necessary for React development?
Babel is necessary if you want your ES6 to work on browsers that don't fully support ES6 (most of them). It transpiles your code to ES5.
Babel is necessary if you want to use JSX. JSX is not a part of the JavaScript standard. Babel transpiles it to vanilla JS. JSX is just a shorter way of writing the real JS.
Webpack is necessary if you want to code split (you do). It will bundle and minify all your code, making it optimal for your client. Webpack is usually the piece that tells Babel to transpile.
No tool is necessary. You can always do it yourself. But you shouldn't do it yourself, because Webpack and Babel do it faster and better.
More on reddit.com
» npm install @babel/preset-react
You should start your project with Create React App (CRA).
It's a React app initializer made by the React team. It makes all the setup for you (including Babel and Webpack configurations) and add some really nice features to your development environment.
If you don't want to use CRA, you will need to install:
babel-corebabel-preset-envbabel-preset-react
Then create a file .babelrc in the root of your project containing:
{ "presets": ["env", "react"] }
Then install and configure Webpack to run the Babel transforms.
(Or you could also run Babel manually with babel-cli).
The React documentation slightly addresses the Babel setup problem here.
They also suggest to use CRA here.
Ah, I found an answer in a Beginner's Guide to React at https://egghead.io/courses/the-beginner-s-guide-to-reactjs.
Apparently there is a standalone Babel compiler you can just link to in the head of the document, along with the links to ReactJS and it "does the right thing". Yay! Here are the links I'm using:
<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/umd/react.production.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/umd/react-dom.production.min.js"></script>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/[email protected]/babel.min.js"></script>
In the script tag that contains the ReactJS and JSX code, you must use type=text/babel:
<script type="text/babel">...</script>
I hope this helps other people starting out with React and JSX.
I'm guessing I'll eventually need to learn how to use NPM, NPX, Node, Webpack, and Babel (and possibly other tools) to run production ReactJS code, but for now I'm hoping this will allow me to learn ReactJS without having to worry about all that.