How to setup Mocha in Node to work with ECMAScript 2016 using Babel

I got the main pointers from this SO question, this blog post, and the official Mocha documentation (which however does not deal explicitly with Babel and ECMAScript2016). This post was also marginally useful.

Main points:

• install Mocha (for development only) locally, not globally (i.e. don't use the accursed -g option) with:

  npm --D mocha
            

• ensure you have the Babel polyfill properly installed
• make a test directory and place your testing code there. At the top of your code do a:

  import 'babel-polyfill';
          

• Add the following in your scripts tag in your package.json file:

  "test": "mocha --compilers js:babel-core/register"
            

Refer to my obj-properties module code for a working testing setup.