Use of babel-register hook in prod

[frankleng]

according to https://babeljs.io/docs/setup/#babel_register it's not meant for prod use.

guess they are encouraging people to precompile.

thinking the best way is to create another webpack build for the server code. thoughts?

[baygeldin]

I've also stumbled upon this today and decided that the most painless way to follow the babel recommendations is to run everything with babel-node in development and when you're ready compile your backend js with babel and just copy everything you need to release folder.

So, now I have these lines in my npm scripts:

"clean": "rm -rf release",
"start": "babel-node server.js",  
"release": "babel-node node_modules/.bin/gulp release"

And my gulpfile looks like this:

import gulp from 'gulp';
import babel from 'gulp-babel'
import filter from 'gulp-filter'

gulp.task('release', () => { 
    let path_list = ['{src,static}/**/*.*', 'package.json', 'LICENSE',
        '!src/{containers,containers/**,components,components/**}'];
    let filter_babel = filter(['src/**/*.js'], { restore: true });

    return gulp.src(path_list)
        .pipe(filter_babel)
        .pipe(babel())
        .pipe(filter_babel.restore)
        .pipe(gulp.dest('release'));
});

Then, when you're ready to deploy, invoke npm install --production in release folder and run server with just node.

[hyzhak]

@frankleng ask myself the same question, and it seems that @erikras had babel-node before but on some reason switched to babel-register https://github.com/erikras/react-redux-universal-hot-example/commit/a2e162fc5d6b1e1f33c7ea5b77b9d8d7e0f987bf. I didn't find any explanation from him but core team of babel still highly recommend to not use babel-register in production https://github.com/babel/example-node-server/issues/13.

[Dattaya]

@hyzhak, you probably know this already, but babel-node is not meant for production either:

You should not be using babel-node in production. It is unnecessarily heavy, with high memory usage due to the cache being stored in memory. You will also always experience a startup performance penalty as the entire app needs to be compiled on the fly.

This is what I use ATM:

    "start": "cross-env NODE_ENV=production node --harmony ./build/server",    
    "build:server": "rimraf ./build && babel src -d build --copy-files",