Is babel supposed to throw syntax errors?

Question

I have setup a node.js gulp file to use the babel transform allowing me to utilize ES6 features in browser scripts.

When I add an intentional syntax error to the input file I am not seeing any error messages being output by babelify despite having subscribed to the 'error' event as suggested in the Using Babel with Browserify guide.

Example of invalid syntax:

immmmport $ from 'jquery';

Instead of showing an error in the CLI it just silently fails.

Here is how I have configured my gulp task:

gulp.task('build', () => {
    browserify(options)
        .transform(babelify)
        .add(sourceFilePath)
        .bundle()
        .pipe(source(outputFileName))
        .pipe(buffer())
        .pipe(gulpif(!argv.production, sourcemaps.init({ loadMaps: true })))
        .pipe(gulpif(argv.production, streamify(uglify())))
        .pipe(gulpif(!argv.production, sourcemaps.write('/')))
        .pipe(gulp.dest(outputDirName));
})

Am I missing any steps here?

Answer 1

The source of this problem was that I needed to add the following line:

.on("error", err => { gutil.log("Browserify Error", gutil.colors.red(err.message)) })

So that I have this:

gulp.task('build', () => {
    browserify(options)
        .transform(babelify)
        .add(sourceFilePath)
        .bundle()
        .on("error", err => { gutil.log("Browserify Error", gutil.colors.red(err.message)) })
        .pipe(source(outputFileName))
        .pipe(buffer())
        .pipe(gulpif(!argv.production, sourcemaps.init({ loadMaps: true })))
        .pipe(gulpif(argv.production, streamify(uglify())))
        .pipe(gulpif(!argv.production, sourcemaps.write('/')))
        .pipe(gulp.dest(outputDirName));
})

The following page was useful in diagnosing this issue:

https://github.com/substack/node-browserify/issues/1044