Where is the location of .babelrc file?

Question

I have installed Babel and found out that in order to compile JSX, .babelrc file needs to be changed? Where is the file located? I was looking in the babel-preset, babel, babel-jsx folders and so on, but could not find it? Should it be created manually?

Answer 1

.babelrc is never auto created. You must go to the root directory of your project. Create a file - touch .babelrc, open the file and enter the babel settings here, then save. If you are following https://babeljs.io/blog/2015/10/31/setting-up-babel-6, Setting up Babel 6 and installed all the plugins and presets as stated, this may help.

{
  "presets": [
    "es2015",
    "env",
    "react",
    "stage-2"
  ]
},

{
  "plugins": [
    "transform-es2015-arrow-functions",
    "check-es2015-constants",
    "transform-es2015-block-scoping"
  ]
}

Answer 2

The .babelrc file is your local configuration for your code in your project. Generally you would put it in the root of your application repo. It will affect all files that Babel processes that are in the same directory or in sibling directories of the .babelrc.

Answer 3

.babelrc could potentially exist in several places in the node tree.

The project root folder would see to be most likely. The babel config could also be specified within package.json under "babel:" {...}

Lookup behavior

Babel will look for a .babelrc in the current directory of the file being transpiled. If one does not exist, it will travel up the directory tree until it finds either a .babelrc, or a package.json with a "babel": {} hash within.

Use "babelrc": false to stop lookup behavior.

See https://github.com/insin/babel-plugin-react-html-attrs/blob/master/README.md and Look Up behavior-