 Resources from Alejandro Nanez in 2024

A Monorepo is where you have multiple projects inside a singular repository.

monorepo

Introduction to Monorepos with NPM Workspaces

Monorepos are an amazing way to collaborate on a multitude of projects with other team members. The ability to share code seamlessly between projects and have a single source of truth is paramount when working on projects with multiple moving wheels. 

One of the tradeoffs of a Monorepo is all of the management you have to do to make your projects run flawlessly and simultaneously. Each project has it’s own linting, building, testing, and deploying that it runs whenever code in that project changes.

This becomes a real problem when each of your projects lints, builds, tests, and deploys on every PR into your monorepo. You might be fine with a handful of projects but as your applications scale and you accrue more projects, you will need a way to scale. 

Turborepo is the tool that solves your monorepo’s needs.

Turborepo is a task runner for Monorepos. Turborepo caches the results of your CI tasks, schedules those tasks to run at maximum speed, and only runs tasks on the affected code in your PRs.  And because of remote caching, your coworkers, wherever they are, will have the most up-to-date code possible. 

One of the greatest things about it is that it's easy to use and can be incrementally adopted. Turborepo is a thin layer on top of your Monorepo. 

Turborepo doesn't get in the way as it is only a task runner. You don't have to modify your application code or anything to make it work. 

You’ll learn about

- How to set up caching for both local and remote
- CLI-commands and how they enhance your Monorepo
- Parallel execution of your tasks

So hop in and learn about Turborepo today!

Prerequisite: This course is a continuation of Introduction to [Monorepos with NPM Workspaces](https://egghead.io/courses/introduction-to-monorepos-with-npm-workspaces-c03f500b). To get the most out of this course, watch [Monorepos with NPM Workspaces](https://egghead.io/courses/introduction-to-monorepos-with-npm-workspaces-c03f500b) first. 

Migrate a Monorepo from NPM Workspaces to Turborepo

Next.js is a minimalistic framework for server-rendered React applications.

Effectively Build RESTful APIs using Next.js API Routes

We'll learn how to create a middleware function for next-connect. This middleware will work at the route level, for example, for every request that hits the /api/next-connect-middleware endpoint, or at the HTTP verb level, GET /api/next-connect-middleware

Add Middleware to an API Route Created with next-connect

We'll learn an alternative way of creating API routes using the next-connect package. next-connect gives us an alternative that would feel familiar to anyone that has worked with Express in the past.

- https://github.com/hoangvvo/next-connect

Create an API Route Using the next-connect Package

In this lesson, you're going to learn how to create a Middleware that checks for the existence of an Authentication header. If that header doesn't exist, we'll terminate the request and let it continue if it does. We'll abstract that functionality in a middleware so we can reuse it in other API routes.

Add a Middleware to a Next.js API Route

We're going to learn how to create an API route that can read 0 or many dynamic segments from a URL.

Create an Optional Catch-All API Route in Next.js

We're going to learn how to create an API route that can read at least one or more dynamic segments from a URL.

Create a Catch All Next.js API route 

We're going to learn how to read dynamic segments from a URL using dynamic routes.

Create a Dynamic Next.js API route 

We will learn how to create a REST endpoint that returns a hardcoded json response. Apart from that, we'll create deeply nested routes by following Next.js' file based router.

Create a Static REST Endpoint in Next.js

We'll learn how to use Next.js API Routes to hide sensitive information from the clients. In this case, we're calling the JSON Placeholder API with a "secret" value in the headers. All that sensitive information is hidden from the clients since they don't call, or even know, that we're calling the JSON Placeholder API under the hood.

Hide Sensitive Information from the Consumers of Next.js API

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

Thank you for completing my course!

You’ve learned what monorepos are, how to create them from scratch, how to install different projects inside of it, and how to run different scripts inside of a monorepo. 

So where do you go from here? I suggest creating your own Monorepo project template and publish it on Github. Take a look at Yarn Workspaces, pnpm, Learna, Nx and Turborepo for different monorepo tools. 

I also highly suggest Migrating some of your existing projects to a monorepo. Have a main frontend application that consumes a shared UI library package and a backend service. Another way would be to have a backend service, a mobile application and a frontend application. 

Best of luck and happy coding!

Intro to Monorepos with NPM Workspaces Outro

All of our applications and libraries have `test` and `typecheck` commands already written inside of them. We are able to run both the `test` and `typecheck` commands all at the same time as well. 

This has a downside. They don’t run at the same time, it’s just one after the other. To make them run at the same time, we will implement `concurrently` again.

Running Quality Checks in your Monorepo

We already have a utils package that outputs JavaScript. If we want to use that package inside any of our applications, in our case, blog or dashboard, we would have to install it first.

Share Code Between a Library and Applications Inside a Monorepo

Right now, it is not possible to run all the Dev Scripts across all the packages of the monorepo at the same time, because once we run `npm run dev` with the `-ws` flag, we will run the dev-command in the block first, but that command never ends. It is always watching for changes.

In order to run the `dev` scripts across all the packages in the monorepo, the first thing that we have to do, is to create a dev command for each one of the packages in the root package.json file. Then we can use `concurrently` to change them. We go `concurrently` and we tell it to run the utils, then the blog and then the dashboard scripts.

Run Dev Scripts for All Packages Simultaniously

We can install a dependency inside a monorepo by running npm install, then the name of the dependency, in our case, it’s going to be Lodash. But, we are going to add different flags to that.

If we use the `-w` flag, we would have to specify in what package we want to install Lodash. We will do this for `monorepo/utils`. We could also use the `-ws` flag to install Lodash across all the packages in the monorepo. We can also use `-W` in uppercase to install Lodash in the root of the project.

Install Dependencies for Specific Packages in a Monorepo

To run specific commands inside a monorepo we have to type `npm run` then the name of the command, `build`. We then add the flag `-w` for watch mode and specify which package we want to run the build command. In this case, it’s going to be the `utils` package. 

The full command will look like, `npm run build -2 @monorepo/utils`.

If you want to run all of the commands, you'll need to add the `-ws` flag. 

The full command for running all of our build commands will look like, `npm run build -ws`. 

Run App Specific Commands in a Monorepo

Creating a TypeScript library inside the monorepo is easy if we use tsup. To configure tsup, we have to set up the entry point. In our case, it's going to be the index.ts file inside the src directory.

We will also specify some extra options for tsup such as generating the types and source maps. We can also output different formats. In this case, we want to output an ESM file and a CommonJS file.

Add a TypeScript library to your Monorepo using TSUP

In order to create applications inside our monorepo, we can use different CLI tools like create-next-app or the Vite CLI. We'll install them inside the apps folder. We will create a blog and a dashboard app, one using create-next-app and the other using the Vite CLI.

It is also important to note that the only package-lock.json file that should exist, exists at the root of the project.

Install a Next.js and a Vite.js Applications Into a Monorepo

For this course, we are going to be using NPM Workspaces to configure our monorepo. We will have two workspaces, one for our apps and one for our libraries. We configure those in our package.json.

Configure NPM Workspaces in your Package.json

A monorepo is a group of small projects that can be combined to build bigger projects, or they could just be small projects that doesn't know anything about the other projects.

One great thing about monorepos is that the code is available for everyone at every time. If you are a frontend engineer, and you're working in the blog application and you see that there is a bug in the backend application, you can go and fix it right away.

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Alejandro Ñáñez