As our engineering team and projects grew, managing multiple repositories became increasingly complex. The need for a more efficient and streamlined workflow became clear. Issues like fragmented dependency management, inconsistent tooling, and long running pipelines slowed our development process and made collaboration across teams unnecessarily challenging. To solve this, we decided to evaluate the adoption of monorepos — creating a single repository per business domain.
Why Move to a Monorepo?
A monorepo offers several advantages, particularly for teams managing multiple interconnected projects. By consolidating everything into one repository, we gain a unified codebase where shared code and dependencies can be managed more efficiently. This simplifies tasks like refactoring or updating shared libraries because changes can happen in a single place, rather than across scattered repositories.
Another major benefit is the optimization of our CI/CD workflows. Modern monorepo tools offer features like task orchestration, change detection, and remote caching, allowing us to build and test only what has changed. This speeds up pipelines and reduces unnecessary overhead, something we struggle with in our multi-repo setup.
Monorepos also improve collaboration. With teams working within a few repositories, coordinating changes across projects becomes much simpler. It reduces the friction of cross-repository dependencies and ensures greater consistency in tooling, code standards, and versioning.
How We Chose a Monorepo Tool
With the decision to move to a monorepo, the next challenge was selecting the right tooling. There’s no shortage of monorepo solutions out there, and we wanted something that fit our specific needs: excellent developer experience (DX), fast builds, and strong community support. We evaluated several options, including Nx, Turborepo, Rush, Moon, and Lerna, each with its own strengths and trade-offs.
Nx emerged as the most promising tool during our evaluation.
Nx stood out for its flexibility, ease of use, and robust task execution capabilities. It has great documentation, which made getting started straightforward, and its highly extensible nature means we could adapt it to our workflows as needed. One of its standout features is distributed task execution, which allows tasks like builds or tests to run in parallel across projects. Combined with its support for remote caching, Nx ensures that we don’t waste time running redundant processes, significantly speeding up CI pipelines.
Another thing we liked about Nx was its developer experience. It offers tools like code generators to enforce standards across the monorepo, ensuring consistency as the codebase grows. Nx's customization capabilities also mean we can fill any gaps and fine-tune our workflows to adjust it to our needs.
Other Tools We Considered
While Nx became our top choice, we explored a few other options during our evaluation:
- Turborepo was another strong contender. It’s lightweight, developer-friendly, and offers modern features like remote caching. It also has tools to automate migration to a monorepo, which we found useful. However, Nx’s broader feature set and active community gave it the edge.
- Rush, Microsoft’s monorepo solution, is powerful for managing large-scale repositories. It focuses on dependency versioning and changelog enforcement, but felt a bit heavyweight for our needs.
- Moon offered flexibility and a good developer experience, but its lack of free remote caching was a limitation.
- Lerna, while historically popular, focuses primarily on versioning and package publishing. It now integrates with Nx, which made choosing Nx a logical next step.
Conclusion
Moving to a monorepo was a strategic decision to improve efficiency, collaboration, and developer happiness. With Nx, we now have a unified tool to manage our projects, optimize builds, and enforce consistency across our codebase. While adopting a monorepo required us to rethink some of our workflows, the benefits—faster CI/CD, code generation, simplified dependency management, and improved collaboration—have already made a noticeable difference.
We’re excited about the journey ahead and look forward to sharing more about our experience with Nx as we learn! 🚀
Interested in joining the team? Visit Mixmax Careers.
