Unable to compile JSX

[javajosh]

Well, okay, maybe if I post this problem I'll figure it out, too. So it looks like compilation is failing on line 7 (an invalid token failure, telling me that the inline JSX is the problem).

11 Jan 16:10:23 - error: Compiling of 'app/bar.jsx' failed. app/bar.jsx: Unexpected token (7:11)

Here is the content of bar.jsx:

var React = require('react');
var ReactDOM = require('react-dom');


var HelloMessage = React.createClass({
  render: function() {
    return <div>Hello {this.props.name}</div>;
  }
});

//hello
ReactDOM.render(
  <HelloMessage name="John" />,
  document.getElementById('container')
);

Here is my brunch config:

exports.config =
  # See http://brunch.io/#documentation for docs.
  files:
    javascripts:
       joinTo:
        'js/app.js': /^app/
        'js/vendor.js': /^(node_modules|vendor|bower_components)/
    stylesheets:
      joinTo: 'app.css'
    templates:
      joinTo: 'app.js'
  plugins:
    babel:
      presets: ['es2015']
      ignore: [
        /^(bower_components|vendor)/
        'app/legacyES5Code/**/*'
      ]
      pattern: /\.(es6|jsx)$/

[javajosh]

Okay, so I'm still not really sure what I'm doing, but doing this seemed to fix the immediate problem:

npm install --save babel-preset-react

But another problem arises at runtime when I get one of these errors:

Uncaught Error: Cannot find module "react" from "bar"

Clearly it's a missing dependency. But I'm actually a little confused about whether this should be considered a runtime or a compile-time dependency, and how it should be installed. And yes I've looked for a complete example of brunch with react, but they all use the react-brunch plugin which (according to it's own website) is deprecated. :(

[javajosh]

Aha, I figured it out. Brunch is very slick, but could definitely use some more docs. One thing that bit me, as trivial as it may seem, was that I had a locally installed copy in my project that was shadowing my (more recent) globally installed brunch - which had the npm support I wanted.