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In today’s fast-paced development environment, engineering teams increasingly rely on monorepo architectures to manage complex software ecosystems. A monorepo, short for monolithic repository, houses all your apps, packages, and libraries in a single unified codebase. The key benefits of monorepos are rooted in visibility, maintainability, and productivity.
But managing a large monorepo isn’t straightforward. It involves orchestrating multiple build tools, maintaining dependencies, sharing utilities, and optimizing CI/CD pipelines to reduce build times and duplication. That’s where tools like Lerna, Nx, and Turborepo come into play.
Each of these tools targets a unique aspect of monorepo success:
Let’s break down how these tools complement each other, and how developers can use Lerna together with Nx and Turborepo to build powerful, scalable monorepo setups that outperform traditional polyrepo structures.
Lerna has been one of the foundational tools in the JavaScript monorepo ecosystem for years. Originally designed to manage multi-package repositories, Lerna made it easier to link local packages, handle consistent versioning, and execute commands across packages. Despite newer tools gaining popularity, Lerna remains a valuable asset in a monorepo strategy, particularly when integrated with Nx.
The latest versions of Lerna allow it to use Nx under the hood through the "useNx": true flag in lerna.json, making it far more performant. This hybrid setup lets developers leverage Nx’s computation caching, task orchestration, and affected project analysis without abandoning Lerna’s simpler package management workflows. This symbiosis means teams can modernize their monorepos without undergoing a full migration.
Before diving deeper into tooling, it’s essential to understand why monorepos matter. Large teams working on microservices, UI components, backend APIs, and shared utilities often suffer from code duplication, dependency drift, inconsistent tooling, and siloed CI/CD pipelines when using multiple repositories.
Monorepos solve this by offering:
As engineering teams scale, monorepos become vital for controlling complexity, accelerating feature delivery, and simplifying cross-project collaboration.
Let’s briefly explore what each tool brings to the table in modern monorepo development workflows.
Lerna is best known for its ability to manage multiple interdependent packages within a single monorepo. It provides powerful capabilities:
With "useNx": true, Lerna can now delegate task execution and project graph analysis to Nx, giving it modern performance capabilities.
Turborepo, by Vercel, is a monorepo build system built for speed. It focuses on:
Turborepo reduces build times significantly, especially when working with JS/TS projects. While it lacks native multi-language support and package publishing tools, it excels in developer experience and speed for frontend-heavy stacks.
Nx is a full-featured build system and monorepo management toolkit that:
It is especially suitable for enterprise-grade monorepos with thousands of packages, large-scale CI/CD pipelines, and complex architecture.
Many engineering teams already use Lerna in existing projects. Instead of migrating everything to Nx or Turborepo, integrating Nx with Lerna allows developers to:
By simply enabling "useNx": true in lerna.json, you unlock powerful performance gains. Nx takes over task execution, applies remote and local caching, and only runs tasks on changed packages, reducing build and test times by up to 90%.
While Lerna + Nx is a complete setup, Turborepo can be added to projects to experiment with its build pipelines or integrate with Vercel’s CI/CD system.
Turborepo allows task pipelines to be defined in turbo.json, using cache and dependency-based execution. It’s best suited for JavaScript-based workflows that prioritize simple developer experience and fast iteration over complex project graphs.
Start with a simple Lerna monorepo:
csharp
npx lerna init
This generates:
Install Nx:
css
npm install --save-dev nx
Modify your lerna.json file:
json
{
"useNx": true,
"packages": ["packages/*"],
"version": "independent"
}
Generate an Nx workspace:
csharp
npx nx init
This creates nx.json, workspace.json, and other configuration files that Nx uses to manage your project graph and task runners.
Define cacheable tasks in nx.json:
json
{
"tasksRunnerOptions": {
"default": {
"runner": "nx/tasks-runners/default",
"options": {
"cacheableOperations": ["build", "test", "lint"]
}
}
}
}
Install:
css
npm install --save-dev turbo
Create turbo.json:
json
{
"pipeline": {
"build": {
"dependsOn": ["^build"],
"outputs": ["dist/**"]
},
"test": {
"outputs": []
}
}
}
This enables Turborepo to execute tasks incrementally based on dependency graphs and caching logic.
With Nx and Turborepo integrated, your monorepo leverages local and remote caching to avoid redundant work. Builds, tests, and lint operations that haven’t changed are skipped or reused, drastically reducing pipeline execution time.
With Nx’s affected commands, developers can run:
nginx
npx nx affected:build
This runs builds only on changed packages and their dependents, no need to build the entire monorepo.
A well-structured monorepo with Lerna + Nx allows modularity, code reuse, and easier cross-team collaboration. Apps and libraries are loosely coupled but share a centralized configuration and tooling setup.
By combining Lerna, Nx, and optionally Turborepo, developers can unlock the full potential of monorepos. Whether you’re scaling a single product or managing an enterprise suite of apps and shared libraries, this trio of tools gives you:
This is not just about tools, it’s about crafting a monorepo strategy that aligns with your team’s growth, productivity, and code quality goals.
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