Monorepo is a way to organize an application. In this case, the application is divided into several parts, each of which is a separate package. For example, look at the React repository. You will see that the main parts of this library are separate packages: "react-reconciler", "react-dom"… In other word, monorepo is a multi-package repository.
What are the advantages of this way? In a nutshell, separation into logical parts facilitates versioned, testing and understanding of the overall project. But better than any words is practical experience.
Many years ago I made a personal website for the russian artist Gregory Maiofis. It was a monolithic Ruby On Rails application. Recently I decided to rewrite this as a single-page and monorepo application. You can see the result on github.
In this work I used Lerna and below I want to tell you (in short) how to use this multi-package application management tool.
The first command is lerna init. It creates a new lerna repo. Open the lerna.json file after executing this and add the following lines:
"useWorkspaces": true, "command": { "run": { "npmClient": "yarn" } } And add to the package.json file:
"workspaces": { "packages": [ "packages/*" ] } These changes allow us to use yarn workspaces.
I organized my project in the following manner:
packages |---app // main application with CRA |---admin // Admin Panel |---ui // a library of common React components |---api // a library for working with API The main commands:
// bootstrap the packages in the current Lerna repo lerna bootstrap // Symlink together all packages lerna link // execute the "start" command in all packages // that contains this command // in my case it will be "app" and "admin" lerna run start // execute the build command in the "ui" package only lerna run --scope @project/ui build - More about working with Lerna - https://dev.to/shnydercom/monorepos-lerna-typescript-cra-and-storybook-combined-4hli
- More about workspaces - https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/07/yarn-workspaces-organize-project-codebase-pro/
- More about Lerna - https://github.com/lerna/lerna
Top comments (4)
OK, just don't Lerna to mix frontend and backend. They needs different kinds of
node_modules.Yes, I understand it. In my project the api package is a set of methods that send requests to backend. But anyway thanks for your comment)
Backend and frontend in one is a monolithic app.
I'd recommend to use pnpm + changesets or Rush instead of Lerna.
Thank you for these links! I didn't know about these projects.