babel-plugin-recast

When you are using babel to transform code, allows you to leverage recast to preserve as much formatting as possible during the transformation. Great for writing codemods.

Usage

// babel.config.js

module.exports = (api) => {
  api.cache(true); // Or whatever you need

  return {
    plugins: [
      // Order in the plugins array is not important
      'babel-plugin-recast',
    ],
  };
};

How it works

This package encapsulates the current mechanism by which recast should be integrated with babel, using the supported but undocumented parserOverride and generatorOverride plugin hooks.

Note that only one plugin can override parsing. If you already had a plugin to override parsing you can pass its override to this plugin to be chained. You don't need to worry about this with the official babel-plugin-syntax-* packages, which are not implemented as parser overrides but merely adjust the options passed to the default parser.

return {
  plugins: [
    [
      'babel-plugin-recast',
      {
        // Disclaimer: I didn't test this and it may not work
        parserOverride: require('other-plugin')
          .parserOverride,
      },
    ],
  ],
};

Recast's source mapping supplants babel's when you use this plugin. Is it better? I don't know.