Atom Error: ‘Const’ is available in ES6 (use ‘esversion: 6’)

I recently upgraded to using the Atom editor to do a majority of my coding. I shied away from it at first because I experienced an error that caused it to eat up all of my memory constantly. Now, months later, they seem to have addressed that issue and it works great! I like it almost as much as Sublime Text now, and feel like I’m going to enjoy it even more soon.

But, as I was progressing through the SurviveJS book recently I found that the JSHint linter I was using didn’t play nice with ES6. Every time I would use something ES6-y like:

const webpack = require('webpack');

My linter would blow up, red all over.

Specifically the error said: “‘const’ is available in ES6 (use ‘esversion: 6’) or Mozilla JS extensions (use moz). (W104)”. Initiating Google-fu yielded unhelpful results. After digging though, here is the fix for this problem.

JSHint has to be configured with a .jshintrc file in the project’s root directory. Simply create a .jshintrc file there with the following object:

{ 
  "esversion": 6 
}

Save. Problem solved! Don’t know why this has to be so complicated but hopefully this will save you time going through your Atom package settings uselessly.

• Thanks. That was helpful.
  One thing I would like you to add in the article is to mention how to create a .jshintrc file. I thought it was an extension (like .json) and so I created es6.jshintrc and as expected that didn’t work. After fiddling a little, I created a simple .jshintrc file and that worked. It would be helpful for novice programmers like me.

  • Great point Shailesh! Ya, the filename is just .jshintrc . Files beginning with a dot are hidden files and can be used to help configure things (there’s also .gitignore, .babelrc, .bashrc, etc.) Fun fact: the ‘rc’ at the end seems to stand for ‘runcom’ or ‘run commands’ (http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3467/what-does-rc-in-bashrc-stand-for) .

    • I already have a .jshintrc file. Its contents are as follows
      {
      “curly”: true,
      “eqeqeq”: true,
      “immed”: true,
      “latedef”: true,
      “newcap”: true,
      “noarg”: true,
      “sub”: true,
      “undef”: true,
      “boss”: true,
      “eqnull”: true,
      “browser”: true,
      “smarttabs”: true,
      “globals”: {
      “jQuery”: true,
      “angular”: true,
      “console”: true,
      “$”: true,
      “_”: true,
      “moment”: true,
      “describe”: true,
      “beforeEach”: true,
      “module”: true,
      “inject”: true,
      “it”: true,
      “expect”: true,
      “xdescribe”: true,
      “xit”: true,
      “spyOn”: true
      }
      }

      When i try to add
      {
      “esversion”: 6
      }, it still gives me an error

      • You may be breaking the JSON structure, expected by jshint. Try putting a single line:
        “esversion”: 6,
        note the comma at the end, between smarttabs and globals.

        Also, creating the .jshintrc file in an user’s home directory enables it for all projects by that user.

        Cheers!