How to ignore changed files when publishing with Lerna

Before tagging a new version, lerna scans your codebase for changed files. If it finds a changed file, it’ll recommend a new version. This is really useful most of the time, but you only want to bump to a new version when some library functionality changes. You certainly don’t want to introduce a new version just because you changed the README.md file.

There are two ways that you can tell lerna to ignore specific changed files.

The — ignore-changes flag

You can use the --ignore-changes flag to prevent lerna from publishing new versions when it finds changes in specific file types.

lerna version --ignore-changes '**/*.md'

In the lerna.json file

If you’d prefer, you can add an ignore key in the lerna.json file.

// lerna.json
"commands": {
  "version": {
    "ignore": ["**/*.md"]
  }
}