Transpile with babel CLI

Question

I want to transpile several js files that are in ES6 to be compatible with chrome, but it seems the docs in http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/cli/ are not accurate.

After doing the first few steps I type in the console: babel and get:

You have mistakenly installed the babel package, which is a no-op in Babel 6. Babel's CLI commands have been moved from the babel package to the babel-cli package.

 npm uninstall babel npm install --save-dev babel-cli 

See http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/cli/ for setup instructions.

And even if I run those two commands it mention, I still get the same error.

So my question is how are you supposed to transpile files with Babel and CLI?

Answer 1

A bit old question, but in case someone ended here through Google like me:

I had the same problem, just ran

npm install --save-dev babel-cli

in a new and completely empty directory in order to test something and could not transpile when calling babel through npx with the same error. I didn't have Babel installed globally, but after a while I noticed npm didn't create the package.json file. So I deleted everything, created empty package.json with just

{

}

installed babel-cli again (npm now added dev dependency to the json file) and now it works fine.