How can I use Babel for CLI program?

Question

I'm trying to write some CLI program on node using Babel. I'd seen question How do I use babel in a node CLI program? and there loganfsmyth said:

Ideally you'd precompile before distributing your package.

Okay, now I'm using:

"scripts": {
    "transpile": "babel cli.js --out-file cli.es5.js",
    "prepublish": "npm run transpile",
}

But, I faced the problem, when Babel adds 'use strict'; line right behind #!/usr/bin/env node header. For example, if I have cli.js:

#!/usr/bin/env node

import pkg from './package'

console.log(pkg.version);

I'll get this:

#!/usr/bin/env node'use strict';

var _package = require('./package');

… … …

And this doesn't work. When I try to run it, I always get:

/usr/bin/env: node'use strict';: This file or directory does'nt exist

How can I solved this problem?

Answer 1

The solution from @DanPrince is perfectly acceptable but there's an alternative

cli.js

keep this file es5

#!/usr/bin/env node
require("./run.es5.js");

run.js

// Put the contents of your existing cli.js file here,
// but this time *without* the shebang
// ...

Update your scripts to

"scripts": {
    "transpile": "babel run.js > run.es5.js",
    "prepublish": "npm run transpile",
}

The idea here is that the cli.js shim doesn't need to be tranpsiled so you can keep your shebang in that file.

cli.js will just load run.es5.js which is the babel-transpiled version of run.js.