babel-loader jsx SyntaxError: Unexpected token

For me the solution was to create the file .babelrc with this content:

{
  "presets": ["react", "es2015", "stage-1"]
}

Since the answer above still leaves some people in the dark, here's what a complete webpack.config.js might look like:

var path = require('path');
var config = {
    entry: path.resolve(__dirname, 'app/main.js'),
    output: {
        path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'build'),
        filename: 'bundle.js'
    },
    module: {
        loaders: [{
            test: /\.jsx?$/,
            loader: 'babel',
            query:
            {
                presets:['es2015', 'react']
            }
        }]
    },

};

module.exports = config;

Add "babel-preset-react"

npm install babel-preset-react

and add "presets" option to babel-loader in your webpack.config.js

(or you can add it to your .babelrc or package.js: http://babeljs.io/docs/usage/babelrc/)

Here is an example webpack.config.js:

{ 
    test: /\.jsx?$/,         // Match both .js and .jsx files
    exclude: /node_modules/, 
    loader: "babel", 
    query:
      {
        presets:['react']
      }
}

Recently Babel 6 was released and there was a major change: https://babeljs.io/blog/2015/10/29/6.0.0

If you are using react 0.14, you should use ReactDOM.render() (from require('react-dom')) instead of React.render(): https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/#changelog

UPDATE 2018

Rule.query has already been deprecated in favour of Rule.options. Usage in webpack 4 is as follows:

npm install babel-loader babel-preset-react

Then in your webpack configuration (as an entry in the module.rules array in the module.exports object)

{
    test: /\.jsx?$/,
    exclude: /node_modules/,
    use: [
      {
        loader: 'babel-loader',
        options: {
          presets: ['react']
        }
      }
    ],
  }

I ran into a similar issue when migrating from babel 5 to babel 6.

I was just running babel to compile the src to lib folder babel src --out-dir lib

I will share my setup for babel 6:

Ensure you have the following babel 6 devDependencies installed

"babel-core": "^6.7.6",
"babel-loader": "^6.2.4",
"babel-preset-es2015": "^6.6.0",
"babel-preset-react": "^6.5.0",
"babel-preset-stage-0": "^6.5.0"

Add your .babelrc file to the project:

{
  "presets": ["es2015", "stage-0", "react"]
}