I don’t want recursion, but it does anyway.
My settings.ini contains:
nbs_path = .
doc_path = docs
recursive = False
However, when I run nbdev_build_lib it finds notebooks in other folders, such as exploratory/myproject/*.ipynb and tries to convert those too.
How do I get it to stop doing this?
What version of nbdev are you using? Can you upgrade?
I was using 1.1.12, which I see is before you patched this. So I upgraded to current (1.1.14).
nbdev_build_lib respects the flag: toggling it changes recursion.nbdev_build_docs ignores it: always recurses.Example with recursive = False:
notebooks>touch example.ipynb # Create empty file
notebooks>mv example.ipynb exploratory/ # Move it to subdir
example.ipynb -> exploratory/example.ipynb
(peregrine) notebooks>nbdev_build_docs # Run build_docs
...
converting: /Volumes/Peregrine/pg_tools/code/notebooks/exploratory/example.ipynb
Notebook does not appear to be JSON: ''...
...
Conversion failed on the following:
example.ipynb
It seems I’m running today’s version (Apr 19):
notebooks>ll `which nbdev_build_docs`
-rwxrwxr-x 1 ... wheel 297B Apr 19 10:35 /opt/anaconda3/envs/peregrine/bin/nbdev_build_docs
Thank you! 
Pulled and tested.
I think the same patch is needed in _create_default_sidebar(). At least that solved a remaining issue for me.
#files = nbglob(recursive=Config().get('recursive',None))
files = nbglob(recursive=Config().get('recursive', 'False').lower() == 'true')
Grep shows 3 locations with Config().get('recursive'..., so maybe one more:
nbdev//nbs/03_export2html.ipynb: " notebook2script(fname=fname, bare=bare, recursive=Config().get('recursive', 'False').lower() == 'true')"
nbdev//nbs/03_export2html.ipynb: " recursive=Config().get('recursive', 'False').lower() == 'true'\n",
nbdev//nbs/03_export2html.ipynb: " files = nbglob(recursive=Config().get('recursive',None))\n",
Thank you! Unsurprisingly much better than my attempt would have been.
(Do you have a coffee fund?)
Just pass on the love to someone else 