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How we reduced our nodejs monorepo build time by 70%

Dima Grossman on January 10, 2022

At Novu, we use a monorepo to manage our 24 libraries and apps. There are many debates over whether you should use a monorepo or a poly-repo. For u...
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Blessing Makaraba

Cool Stuff

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Olyno • Edited

What about yarn berry? I didn't make any benchmark about it, but i'm using it in a lot of project and never got any issue so far. Not sure it's faster than pnpm, but it could be :p

Also, nice article! Thanks you for sharing with us your story!

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Michael R. • Edited

I used berry for quite some time to manage web apps built in a monorepo style. (not nearly as many as 24 applications but usually two or three between frontend and backend plus a couple APIs) It was a love-hate relationship.

Maybe if I had been able to build a brand new app from scratch it would have been easier to transition, but ultimately I ended up going back to NPM after v7 came out and everyone was talking about how they've almost managed to catch up with yarn.

Not going to lie, it's still a tad slower, likely considerably slower for a sizable monorepo, but the familiarity and improved verbosity is so much better than the headache berry was causing me every other week.

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Dima Grossman

Actually not heard about berry, i'll check it out. Thank you!

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Jan Cizmar

We are just migrating to Turborepo, it seems more simple to use then NX and it should be faster as well.

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Dima Grossman

That's cool! Congrats Turborepo is very neat and simple indeed. After doing some readings decided to go with NX. Some of the reasons and data we had based on this and a few other benchmarks: github.com/vsavkin/large-monorepo

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Karhik Suryadevara

Iam a little confused, what is monorepo and polyrepo

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Dima Grossman

A monorepo contains multiple projects in a single git repository, and polyrepo means that you have one project per github repository. Hope this explains it to you :)

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Zenobius Jiricek • Edited

yeah nah.

A monorepo is not merely a repo that holds many projects.

A monorepo is a repo that holds two or more separate projects that can define their relationship through a dependancy graph.

If you can't do this, then it's just a repo.

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Karhik Suryadevara

Now i understand, Thank you

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Biswarup Bouri

Try Turborepo

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Dima Grossman

Actually we tried, decided to go with NX in the end.

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Biswarup Bouri

Yep, because there's not enough resource available to get started with Turborepo. Anyway build caching feature is amazing I'm love it ❤️

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Liran Tal

Thanks for sharing!

I highly recommend to check out bilt for monorepo management: github.com/giltayar/bilt - would love to hear what you think of it.

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Dima Grossman

With great love, always trying my best on finding how to give back to this amazing community ❤️