Installing Babel globally should be avoided. If you need Babel in a project, you should install it into the project itself and run it as an npm script or via

$(npm bin)/babel-node

or

./node_modules/.bin/babel-node

from the docs (https://babeljs.io/docs/usage/cli/):

Using npm you can install Babel globally, making it available from the command line.

so: globally or not?

I agree that in general it should be avoided and I personally install babel as dev dependency in my projects, but I like using the CLI for quick tests.

For example, how am I supposed to try all these new cool presets? 😄

Why wouldn't you be able to use the CLI just because you installed it with --save or --save-dev? It's still installed, just not globally accessable. It's in the node_modules/.bin folder.. Or am I missunderstanding something?

I am well aware of the workarounds you listed, I reported the issue because it's inconsistent with the documentation and I'm not completely sure if this should be considered a bug or not.

We resolve plugins and presets relative to the input file path. You're using the CLI and haven't referenced a file on disk so there's nowhere for it to be resolved from. Put it in a file and execute it and it will work.

I'd love to be able to fire up a REPL for some quick tests written in ES6. Sometimes you just want to test something out and there's no project context to do it in. Couldn't babel-node resolve the path for presets based on the current working directory with a fallback to global node-modules if no input file was specified? Maybe I'm totally missing something, but it seems pointless to have a babel based REPL if you can't load any presets or plugins.

The REPL was already came with a lot of caveats, I'm tempted to say remove it.

I'm also using babel-cli and babel-node for running quick tests locally without having a whole project set up. You can easily install the preset in the folder you are testing:

npm install babel-preset-es2015

And then run your test

babel-node --presets es2015 index.js

Obviously it would be ideal if babel-node checked the global folder after checking the current working directory, but this is a workaround that is fairly easy to do.

@kittens As I can see this is not exactly how it works now.
I have the following file structure.
server
server.js
import App from '..\client\components\App'
client
components
App.jsx

When I run babel-node in server directory and pass it server.js as a input file it raises an error because it can't find react preset relative to directory \client\components. I have react preset installed in server/node_modules but not in client/node_modules.
So if I understood correct it looks for presets for each file it process.