Setting up Your Environment

Feathers and most plug-ins work on Node v0.12.x and up but we recommend using the latest version or at least Node v5.x. All code samples in this documentation are written in ES2015 which is not supported in Node versions prior to v5.0.0 without the use of a code transpiler like Babel (see below).

Node Version Manager

The easiest way to get the latest Node version and avoiding many problems especially around permissions is by using nvm or nvm-windows. Run the installation script and then, to see all available versions, run nvm ls-remote. To install the latest version of Node and set it as the default run:

nvm install node
nvm alias default node

Since newer versions of Node (> 5.0) support all ES6 features we are going to use you can skip ahead to building the app and not have to worry about Babel.

Babel

If you can't use Node 5+ (although you really should) or would like to use even newer language features that are not part of Node yet you will need a JavaScript transpiler like Babel. The generator from the quick start guide and the tutorial does this automatically for you already if you are generating the application with an older Node version.

There are many ways to set up Babel. A quick and easy setup for development looks like this:

npm install babel-core babel-cli babel-preset-es2015 --save-dev

Create a .babelrc file like this:

{ "presets": ["es2015"] }

Update your package.json start and test scripts:

"scripts": {
  "start": "babel-node src/index",
  "test": "mocha test/ --recursive --compilers js:babel-register"
}

Now the application will run using ES2015 (including things like the import syntax which is not part of Node yet).

ProTip: Babel is not included by default because we found that it slows down startup time and memory consumption during development considerably and Node 5 already supports most ES2015 features.