Build our UI framework inside a monorepo using Lerna.
Building npm packages across many individual repos make big changes difficult to make, test, and publish. Using a monorepo we can solve many of these and more issues.
Our UI framework takes advantage of npm in order to have independently versioned packages for each component or utility so that they can be shared across applications.
However, right now we build these packages in separate repos. This causes some headaches:
- Setting up all the packages locally is a long process that takes up a ton of space because you install the same development tools 50 times.
- Working on changes that touch a bunch of different packages is difficult,
npm link-ing them is a headache at best, and impossible at worst. - Running tests across all packages means running each one individually which might as well be impossible.
- We don't have a good sense of code coverage across all packages.
Instead of having a bunch of separate repositories, we could copy what Babel (and others) have done and use a monorepo using Lerna.
The repo would still just be a normal git repository, but with a packages/
directory that contains all of our components, utils, etc. that get built into
separate npm packages.
There's a bunch of benefits to this:
- Setting up a dev environment for every single package it now just 3 commands:
git clone,npm install, andnpm run bootstrap - Cross-dependencies within the repo are automatically
npm link'd between each other so that it's easier to dev on them. - You can now make cross-dependency changes within a single commit/pull request
- You can run tests across all of the packages at once (note you can still test
a single package with
npm test -- --package cf-component-button) - We only have to install the ~300 modules that make up the build system once
- We only have one build system for them all
- We can get a high level sense of code coverage across all packages
ONE MORE THING... (omg I'm basically Steve Jobs)
Since all of the repos have examples in them, I've adapted them into one giant living example (styles pending):
Eventually I'll set this up with our styles repo so that we can view our styles in a living breathing style guide which is far less likely to go out of date because it's directly tied to the packages.
So what's the holdup?
Lerna, the module we use to manage all of this, doesn't support independent versioning (don't worry about what that means), but I got push access to the repo and free reign to do whatever I want to, so I'm going to add this: lerna/lerna#20
Once, that's done, we'll be good. I'm already started on it: lerna/lerna#26