unjs/magicast

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

2477 stars · 50 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Magicast is a TypeScript library for programmatically modifying JavaScript and TypeScript source files using a simple, JSON-like proxy API over ASTs parsed by recast and Babel. It preserves original code formatting while allowing easy manipulation of imports, exports, and function call arguments.

Use cases

• programmatically edit config files like defineConfig calls
• write codemods to update JS/TS source code
• modify module imports and exports in a file
• append values to exported arrays while preserving formatting
• generate or transform TypeScript configuration files
• manipulate function call arguments in source code

When to choose

• you need to edit JS/TS files programmatically without losing formatting
• writing codemods or config file editors (e.g., Nuxt modules)
• you want readable code manipulation instead of raw AST work

When to avoid

• you only need to parse or lint code without writing it back
• you need full AST-level control for complex transformations (use Babel or jscodeshift directly)
• your target language is not JavaScript or TypeScript

Facets

library · maturity active

parser developer-tools developer-tools parsers web-development ast-manipulation codemod typescript recast babel code-generation nodejs javascript

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="unjs/magicast")