Monorepo

I've been using monorepos for commercial projects for a while now and I've come to appreciate the benefits they bring, so I've been thinking about doing the same for my personal projects. In this post, I'll share how I set up my self monorepo, so that hopefully you can do it too.

What is a monorepo?

A monorepo is simply a collection of would-be repositories in a single repository. Usually all source files, issues and other materials and processes of an organization or a subset of it are stored in a single repository. This method is already used by big companies like Google and Microsoft and Github is continuing to extend it's support for monorepos -since they are also using it in Microsoft.

Features

• Devcontainers for reproducible development environments
• Commitlint for consistent commit messages both locally and on CI
• MegaLinter for consistent code quality and linting both locally and on CI
• Self-hosted runners for free CI/CD runs
• Code owners for code responsibility
• .gitconfig for the latest git features
• Required workflow runs including pr-watcher workflow
• Advanced security features enabled like verified commits, branch protection rules etc.
• npm scripts for easy access to features and maintaining monorepo

Getting Started

Requirements

• GH CLI
• npm
• Docker
• VSCode

This is a template repository, so you can use it as a starting point for your own monorepo. To use it as your own monorepo, you can click the Use this template button at the top of the page or with gh-cli you can run the following command:

gh api \
  --method POST \
  -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
  -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
  /repos/arifbalik/monorepo/generate \
   -f "owner=your-username" -f "name=my-monorepo" -f "description=A test with monorepos"

Setup

After you've created your own monorepo, you can clone it to your local machine and run the following commands:

npm install

this will install all the dependencies for the monorepo.

From this point on I recommend working in a devcontainer, make sure docker deamon is running and then run the following commands:

npm run create-volume
npm run dev

This will create a volume for the devcontainer and start the devcontainer. Press Ctrl+Shift+P and select Remote-Containers: Attach to Running Container... to run the devcontainer.

Devcontainer

Inside the devcontainer volume clone your repo and initialize;

git clone <your-repo-url>
cd <your-repo-name>
npm install

Repo settings are not transferred to your repo when you use the template or fork it, therefore you can edit the scripts/reset-repo-settings.sh script to your needs and run it to reset the repo settings.

npm run reset-repo

I recommend changing any settings again on the script file so they are written in there explicitly and can be restored after an experimentation.

npm scripts

There are a few npm scripts that you can use to maintain your monorepo:

• npm run reset-repo resets the repository to the default settings
• npm run update-from-template updates the repository from the template (arifbalik/monorepo)
• npm run signingkey path/to/signingkey.pub configures git to use ssh signing key to sign commits
• npm run commitlint runs commitlint on the repository
• npm run lint runs megalinter on the repository
• npm run create-volume creates a volume for the devcontainer (if doesn't exist)
• npm run dev starts the devcontainer (builds the image if doesn't exist)
  • optional: npm run dev -- --remove-existing-container rebuilds the image and starts the devcontainer
• npm run dev-shell <command> starts a shell in the devcontainer and runs the command