Throwing errors with FB's invariant library

If you're familiar with Facebook's React, React Native, Flux, Relay libraries, you might notice the extensive use of the invariant function from fbjs npm module in their code bases. The goal of which is being able to provide descriptive error messages for the development environment. These error messages are going to be replaced by a single generic error when the project is compiled for production environments by Babel and a module bundler, such as Webpack or Browserify. This allows to minimize the client-side bundle size, and at the same time provide a good developer experience.

Here is how it works. First, you need to install fbjs and fbjs-scripts npm modules by running:

$ npm install fbjs@next --save
$ npm install fbjs-scripts@next --save-dev

Then update Babel configuration located in pacakge.json file by including dev-expression plugin from the fbjs-scripts npm module:

{
  "babel": {
    "presets": [
      "es2015",
      "stage-0"
    ],
    "plugins": [
      "fbjs-scripts/babel-6/dev-expression",
      "transform-runtime"
    ]
  }
}

Now you can use the invariant helper function in your code as follows:

import invariant from 'fbjs/lib/invariant'

class Greeting {

  constructor(name) {
    if (name) {
      invariant(
        typeof name === 'string' || name instanceof String,
        'The name argument must be a string'
      );
      this.name = name;
    } else {
      this.name = 'Guest';
    }
    this.name = name || 'Guest';
  }

  hello() {
    return `Welcome, ${this.name}!`;
  }

}

export default Greeting;

When you bundle your project for a production environment, you need to make sure that process.env.NODE_ENV variable is set to 'production'. Here is an example how to do it with Webpack — webpack.config.js#L28 in React Starter Kit.