About Monorepos (Turbo / Nx / pnpm)

When to monorepo, tool choice, pitfalls. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Info / Guides collection.

Use Cases

• Engineering leads evaluating monorepo migration for multi-package projects
• Platform teams choosing between Turborepo and Nx for build orchestration
• DevOps engineers optimizing CI pipelines for monorepo caching
• Frontend teams sharing UI components across multiple apps in one repo

Tips

• Read the 'when to monorepo' section before restructuring your codebase
• Compare Turbo, Nx, and pnpm workspaces to match your stack
• Check the pitfalls section for CI cache and dependency hoisting issues

Fun Facts

• Google's monorepo holds over 2 billion lines of code across 86 TB, managed by a custom tool called Piper — it may be the largest single code repository in history.
• Turborepo was created by Jared Palmer in 2021 and acquired by Vercel just 5 months later for an undisclosed sum.
• pnpm (performant npm), created by Zoltan Kochan in 2017, uses a content-addressable store that can save up to 70% of disk space compared to npm.

FAQ

What's a monorepo?

One repository containing multiple projects (packages, services, apps). Shared tooling, atomic cross-project commits, single CI config. Popular at large companies.

When should I use one?

When packages share types, changesets span multiple projects, or when onboarding benefits from a single clone. Not necessary for single-team, single-product code.

Turbo vs Nx vs pnpm workspaces?

pnpm workspaces is the simplest — just package management. Turborepo adds task caching and pipeline. Nx is the most full-featured (generators, plugins, AI-assisted) but has more overhead.

What are the pitfalls?

CI time balloons (rebuild everything for every change). Version bumps across many packages need tooling (changesets). Working set in editors can be slow without config tuning.