https://buttondown.email/blog/just-use-a-monorepo

 
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January 12, 2023
programming

Just use a monorepo

A before-and-after of my setup.

I wrote last month about having migrated Buttondown from a number of
separate microrepositories to a single monorepo. I've since completed
the migration, and the slight irritation I felt from having to unwind
a bunch of technical choices with deployment + continuous integration
has faded.

I am here to tell you: if you are running a software business and you
aren't at, like, Google-tier scale, just throw it all in a monorepo.
I am kicking myself for not having done this to begin with.

Here is a list of I think reasonable drawbacks of having a monorepo
if you are not a Google-tier company:

 1. You cannot apply role-based access controls to certain parts of
    the repository for security/compliance reasons.
 2. You cannot open-source certain parts of your repository. (This
    was the biggest sticking point for me for a while -- I want,
    ideally, everything in Buttondown to be open-source except the
    core plumbing and author-facing application.)

Conversely, here are a list of things that became an order of
magnitude easier now that my entire codebase is in a single
repository:

 1. Rolling out API changes concomitantly with downstream changes to
    the documentation or the OpenAPI spec.
 2. Introducing feature-level changes and the blog post announcing
    those changes.
 3. Context-switching between different workspaces with subtly
    different configurations.

You may be reading this short essay and thinking: "Yeah, no shit! Of
course you do not need a monorepo when you're talking about, like,
150K lines of code." Congratulations -- you are sensible, and well
adjusted, and certainly wiser than I was six months ago.

But I know there's a few of you out there who are clinging to
something -- some irrational reason why you have your welterweight
project split across four separate repositories.

Maybe it's some abstract sense of purity; maybe it's because you
didn't realize most IaaS let you deploy from a subfolder. Whatever
the reason is: trust me. Move it into a monorepo. If you do and you
end up regretting it, [email me] and I'll donate to the charity of
your choice.

To wrap up, I will deputize two people who are smarter than I am who
have also opined on the subject:

 1. Dan Luu
 2. Gregory Szorc

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