Polyfill

How to use the Polyfill.

Babel includes a polyfill that includes a custom regenerator runtime and core-js.

This will emulate a full ES2015+ environment and is intended to be used in an application rather than a library/tool. This polyfill is automatically loaded when using babel-node.

This means you can use new built-ins like Promise or WeakMap, static methods like Array.from or Object.assign, instance methods like Array.prototype.includes, and generator functions (provided you use the regenerator plugin). The polyfill adds to the global scope as well as native prototypes like String in order to do this.

Installation

npm install --save babel-polyfill

Because this is a polyfill (which will run before your source code), we need it to be a dependency, not a devDependency

Usage in Node / Browserify / Webpack

To include the polyfill you need to require it at the top of the entry point to your application.

Make sure it is called before all other code/require statements!

require("babel-polyfill");

If you are using ES6’s import syntax in your application’s entry point, you should instead import the polyfill at the top of the entry point to ensure the polyfills are loaded first:

import "babel-polyfill";

With webpack.config.js, add babel-polyfill to your entry array:

module.exports = {
  entry: ["babel-polyfill", "./app/js"]
};

Usage in Browser

Available from the dist/polyfill.js file within a babel-polyfill npm release. This needs to be included before all your compiled Babel code. You can either prepend it to your compiled code or include it in a <script> before it.

NOTE: Do not require this via browserify etc, use babel-polyfill.

Details

If you are looking for something that won't modify globals to be used in a tool/library, checkout the transform-runtime plugin. This means you won't be able to use the instance methods mentioned above like Array.prototype.includes.

Note: Depending on what ES2015 methods you actually use, you may not need to use babel-polyfill or the runtime plugin. You may want to only load the specific polyfills you are using (like Object.assign) or just document that the environment the library is being loaded in should include certain polyfills.