I've been working on a website which is a collection of single-page applications. I have a monorepo consisting of my applications in separate directories, and each app has it's own package.json. In addition to this, each application contains one or more git submodules, where I place my core libraries (ex. one for the "common" lib, one for SVG, etc.). I'm overall happy with this setup. It works well with tooling, since the submodule is directly within the app directory, and makes it easy to version the code.
EDIT: An example directory structure, where "common" is the git submodule:
frontend/app1/common
frontend/app2/common
That said, the biggest flaw has been dealing with dependencies, as sometimes there are dependencies I would like to have across all applications. Since every app has its own package.json, this means that I have to manually install that dependency across all my apps, should I ever use that dependency in my common lib.
What I'm looking for is a way to split a package.json, such that I could (for example), point the app's package.json at the common lib's (hypothetical) package.json, and inherit its dependencies. I'm aware that this is not possible with package.json, but I can't help but feel this is common enough an alternative might exist.
I know Yarn workspaces provides the ability to create local packages, but this wreaks havoc with the project tooling and makes it more difficult to make quick code changes.
Are there any good workarounds that don't involve building some hacky templating system? My stack is:
Let's say you have these folders:
- app1
- app2
- common
And in common folder you have package.json with node-fetch package, for example.
Also, in common you have index.js with something like this:
import fetch from "node-fetch";
export const getPage = async (page) => await fetch(page);
Then in app1 you have app.js with:
import { getPage } from "../common"
const data = await getPage("http://x.com");
Now all you have to do is to run npm install inside of your common folder.
It can also be a git submodule, doesn't matter. You don't need to add node-fetch into your app1 to get this working.
You might also face another issue: too many package.jsons. For which I wrote a script based on listr that finds all of them recursively and runs npm install or npm test for all of them in parallel. It's not published yet, but I can share some snippets if you're interested.