Disable .babelrc inheritance

Question

How do I force babel NOT to look at the parent directory for .babelrc?

• I have two .babelrc files: ./a/.babelrc and ./a/example/.babelrc.
• I am running babel in ./a/example path.
• ./a/.babelrc defines a plugin “lodash".
• I do not want to use this plugin when executing babel in ./a/example

I have tried setting ./a/example/.babelrc to:

{
    "stage": 0,
    "plugins": []
}

However, running babel in ./a/example path still uses "lodash" plugin.

$ pwd
/a/example
$ cat ./.babelrc
{
    "stage": 0,
    "plugins": []
}
$ cat ./../.babelrc
{
    "stage": 0,
    "plugins": [
        "lodash"
    ]
}
$ babel ./src/
Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, scandir '/a/node_modules/babel-plugin-lodash/node_modules/lodash'
    [..]
$ babel --babelrc ./.babelrc ./src/
Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, scandir '/a/node_modules/babel-plugin-lodash/node_modules/lodash'
    [..]

Answer 1

There is an undocumented property called breakConfig. Set breakConfig to true to disable config inheritance.

This behaviour is going to change in 6.x. In 6.x Babel will break on the first .babelrc it finds. extends property is going to be used to explicitly name other .babelrc files to inherit from.