Use Babel for main process

[davej]

What's the consensus about letting the main process run through babel too? The issue I'm having is that I want to use redux-electron-store but I can't require any of the reducers because they use the ES6 module syntax which currently isn't supported by the latest versions of Electron/Chromium.

[jhen0409]

Yes, if we don‘t use Babel, this is no way to share reducers between Main and Renderer.

@chentsulin what do you think?

[chentsulin]

I don't mind using babel also in main process, but which one approach is our best choice? babel-register?

[davej]

The problem with using babel-register is that babel then needs to be bundled with the app (rather than simply as a dev-dependency).

[davej]

Actually, I guess we could use babel-register in development and then compile it (using webpack?) for the production version.

[wasd171]

Code sharing is quite essential. Unfortunately, simple adding of require('babel-register'); in main.js results in

App threw an error when running TypeError: Path must be a string. Received undefined

requiring the following dummy.js:

module.exports = 'bar';

I've tried webpack'ing main.js, but no luck :(

[naderhen]

Is there a known workaround for this? @davej your solution seems reasonable, but I'm curious how you'd go about it within this boilerplate.

[davej]

@naderhen: it just worked for me.

My entry point file looks like this:

/* eslint strict: 0 */
'use strict';

require('babel-register');
require('./main/init.js');

./main/init.js is where my main process logic is and it uses ES6 modules.

[naderhen]

I have something very similar which does indeed work in terms of running the electron application with babel included. However, when I attempt to package the app via npm run package (on OSX) and run the resulting *.app I get a host of babel related import errors:

Any thoughts? Do you run into the same issue when packaging?

[davej]

@naderhen: I haven't tried packaging the app yet. My plan was to use webpack and create an entry for the main js file. Have you tried using webpack to compile the main process files instead of including babel in your production build?

[naderhen]

hmm, yea @davej I've given the separate webpack entry route a shot but ended up with a slew of other cryptic errors either during the build or packaging process. If you come up with a working solution on your end I'd love to be pointed in the right direction. Willing to test out any other options you think would work too.

[chentsulin]

Closed via #197.