How to do a monorepo setup without tooling, e.g. Nx or Turbo?

[robotkutya]

Dear community,

Thanks for this amazing resource!

I would like to ask if anyone has a good resource for how to set up an integrated style monorepo without any tooling.

In my specific usecase, there would be 2 Vite applications, and a shared "workspace" or "package" that would allow sharing code between the applications. I would like to avoid using workspaces and having to build packages. I would prefer to have a single source of truth for dependencies on the root level.

[Zakariaels]

Hi @robotkutya,

To achieve an integrated monorepo with shared code between two Vite applications while avoiding complex tooling, you can use Yarn Workspaces with a minimal setup.

Even though you mentioned avoiding workspaces, a simple Yarn Workspaces configuration allows you to share code without having to build separate packages, and you can manage all dependencies at the root level.

[robotkutya]

Hey @Zakariaels , thanks for your response!

Can I share you my current understanding how things would fit together, to see if I am on the right track?

So the main idea is to use Yarn (we use pnpm, but it's probably the same in this regard) just as a task runner and not add a workspace as a dependency to another workspace. So e.g. you have a @packages/design-system workspace for your component library, that your @apps/my-app consumes, instead of adding it as a dependency (in which case I would have to build it), one should use TypeScript project references to scope a workspace as a module (so you can run tsc inside each workspace and it will only check the code that is in that workspace). For convenient imports between workspaces, one can use path aliases (e.g. instead of ../../../packages/design-system/button one can just have @packages/design-system/button, but this is not because we added that workspace as a dependency, but because we defined a root level path alias for @packages

Am I on the right track?