mondorepo

Management for collections of packages across teams

For the increasingly common scenario where teams need to work on more than one npm package at a time, mondorepo enables collaboration on a collection of jointly developed repositories that may contain one or multiple projects themselves.

One project, multiple packages and repositories, all aware of each other at runtime.

Motivation

The Node.js package ecosystem has been traditionally developed following the one package per repository rule:

What is a package?
A package is any of the following:

   a) a folder containing a program described by a package.json file
   ...
   g) a git url that, when cloned, results in (a).

This is workable for developing packages that are small in size or complexity and live in relative isolation. As projects' scale increases this approach has a couple significant problems.

1. The amount of code in a complex project often increases beyond what would ideally live in a single package.
2. Most times, multiple teams of developers need to collaborate on concurrently developed packages managed in separate repositories.

Traditional approaches to solve these problems are:

1. Use relative paths across a huge codebase
2. Include jointly developed packages inside the main project's node_modules directory.
3. Following the monorepo approach (mono not mondo).

While there are potential advantages to each of these approaches, here at Sencha we decided to tackle the problem in a way that projects remain modular and sub packages can be developed on their own.

We call these mondorepos.

mondorepos ("mondo: large, big")

As an alternative to monolithic repositories, mondorepo enables teams to collaborate on big complex projects that span across multiple repositories. Each subpackage can be a mondorepo on its own and so on.

An example of this project structure would look like this:

Repository: 'awesomecorp/MyAwesomeProject'
MyAwesomeProject/
    index.js
    package.json      // <- contains a reference to "awesomecorp/My-pkg" under "mondo.uses.My-pkg"

Repository: 'awesomecorp/My-pkg'
MyAwesomeProject/
    index.js
    package.json

Running mondo install will connect all used repositories (declared inside mondo.uses) and make My-pkg available to be used on a simple require('My-pkg') statement, isn't that neat?

This effectively means that each subpackage can be developed on its own if needed, but also can be included as part of any other project that wants to jointly develop a bunch of its own requirements.

Getting started

Install mondorepo globally

We prefer yarn but npm is also fine:

$ yarn global add mondorepo

Bring all other repositories used by your project into play

Once you checked out a project that uses mondorepo, just run:

$ mondo install

If you have a set of known forks configured and wish to use them when installing the project, run:

$ mondo install --forks

Getting help

For help on how to use the CLI tool run:

$ mondo help

For help configuring your project as a mondorepo, check our Getting started guide.

Contributing

Please read CONTRIBUTING.md for details on the code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests.

Versioning

mondorepo uses SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details