BUG: .babelrc is not explicitly pointed to everywhere, sometimes doesn't get used

[exogen]

As @boygirl found in FormidableLabs/victory-component-boilerplate#11, using the @Radium syntax in the new Builder-based victory-component-boilerplate doesn't work, because Babel isn't always getting its config from our .babelrc and thus uses the default settings.

With decorator syntax, this uses the correct .babelrc and works: builder run build-lib

These do NOT work: builder run build-dist and builder run test-frontend

Addng .babelrc to ROOT makes it work, but we don't want to have to do that.

We need a way to pass along our .babelrc path to Webpack (for building dist and testing) and isparta (for coverage) – the latter probably being the most difficult as I don't think an option is exposed.

/cc @ryan-roemer @boygirl

[ryan-roemer]

Yep. Makes sense. I'm looking into this.

[exogen]

There's this outstanding pull request: babel/babel-loader#121

Note that I tried putting .babelrc in the root of builder-react-component already and that didn't work – even though babel/babel#1886 claims that .babelrc is resolved relative to the input file it's transpiling (if that were the case, it seemed like putting it in builder-react-component root should work...). EDIT: Nevermind, forgot that it's transpiling files outside of builder-react-component...

[exogen]

Unless we get some pull requests on some third-party projects merged, or do some kind of path trickery, it's looking to me like custom .babelrc paths aren't well supported enough at the moment by Babel-ecosystem libraries. We could switch to using query for babel-loader, but I think that doesn't solve isparta as they removed the option to pass along Babel options last I checked.

Note that Babel has a BABEL_ENV environment variable (which then uses a certain config in your .babelrc), but not an environment variable for the .babelrc path itself.

[ryan-roemer]

Ugh. Reading up, this comports with my evolving understanding...

@boygirl / @exogen -- Can we:

• Add a section in the README.md in this archetype saying "need ROOT/.babelrc" and a link to this issue.
• Add a .babelrc to formidable-react-component-boilerplate and victory-boilerplate

... in the meantime?

[exogen]

@ryan-roemer 👍 Can do. I think we should remove --babelrc from this archetype too in the meantime, so it's always using the same config, otherwise stuff might get weird.

[ryan-roemer]

@exogen -- Agreed. Thanks!