Discussion on: Do you use a monorepo?

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Replies for: What exactly is a monorepo and what are its advantages?

monorepo only make sense if all sub repositories are in only one language. And I know only one language doing this, JavaScript.

For JavaScript, all modules are shared, that is, only one node_modules folder, ensuring all dependencies' versions are the same.

Patryk Jeziorowski • Apr 9 '20

I'm not sure if it's true that it makes sense only with Javascript, there are huge companies like Google that use it with multiple languages.

But being such a giant as Google allows you to do crazy things.

I'm curious if in small/medium size projects monorepos are popular only in Javascript ecosystem (if we take only small/medium projects into account, then I agree that only JS makes any sense. I think this is the only language that has any tools for doing this anyway?).

Sebastian Vargr • Apr 9 '20 • Edited

I think i can see were you are coming from but,
lets look at some stories to explore this more. :)

As a developer i want to pull 1 repository and then i expect to have all the necessary first-party code available to run a given project.
As a developer i would expect to change first-party code within a project without having to consider version matching it with other first-party parts.
As a developer i want to be able to write integration test between first-party parts without having to manage parts versions.
As a developer when i make a PR with a feature i would expect all the changes to be in that PR.

Imagine a stack with a C# API server or headless CMS, a couple of FE's intended for different user groups, like end-user or admin.

Add in some machine learning , written in Python that the C# needs to interact with occasionally.

Very quickly, monorepo starts to become the only way, i can think of, that handles these stories. :)