lerna VS changesets

Lerna.js is a popular tool for managing JavaScript projects with multiple packages, often referred to as monorepos. It simplifies the process of versioning, publishing, and managing dependencies across various packages within a single repository.

For dependency and workflow management in Gaia, we can use any tool available in the Node ecosystem. You might suggest Lerna or even Turborepo. For our needs, the default npm workspaces will suffice.

That’s how I ended up with the library at version 2.x.x. From that point, I stopped making those mistakes. With Lerna, I no longer have to worry about changing package versions that haven’t been updated; Lerna takes care of that for me.

Open the project up in your favorite IDE. Let's take a quick look at the project organization. The project has an Angular frontend and NestJS API backend housed in a Lerna monorepo. If you are curious about how to recreate the project, check out the repo's README file. I'll include all the npx commands, CLI commands, and the manual steps used to create the project.

Lerna currently maintained by Nx team

On Netlify's enterprise tier, approximately 46% of builds are monorepos, with the majority leveraging Nx and Lerna. Recognizing this trend, Netlify has focused on enhancing the setup and deployment experiences for monorepo projects. In particular they worked on an "automatic monorepo detection" feature. When you connect your project to GitHub, Netlify automatically detects if it's part of a monorepo, reads the relevant settings, and pre-configures your project. This eliminates the need for manual setup. This feature also extends to local development via the Netlify CLI.

This is the exact problem monorepos were born to solve. Not only will a monorepo let you share UI components, you'll be able to gradually add shared application logic as well (for instance, do all of your apps have their own logic for connecting to a database? you could roll that into a shared library with a monorepo). There are a lot of tools for accomplishing this in JS, but probably the most popular is lerna, which is built on top of NX (though lots of teams roll their own monorepo in nx without lerna, which IMO is a totally valid option).

To begin, you need to prepare your environment. A few ways to build a React package include tools like Bit, Storybook, Lerna, and TSDX. However, for this tutorial, you will use a zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules called Microbundle.

When you are trying to understand the source code, you can use documentation as your starting point and search for variables and functions to set the direction for your exploration when you are dealing with large projects like Changesets.

In this article, an overview of Changesets and its usage in t3-env are provided.

As a general rule, I recommend against completely automating the release of your software and instead have a manual approval step required at some point in the process. Tools like changesets, the one we use at Latitude, greatly help with this. Changesets takes care of publishing new packages, updating changelogs, and tagging releases, yet it can only do so via automatic pull requests that have the same approval requirements as any other PR at Latitude.

All these versioning management is done with Changesets library

In my circles, this is the go-to for release automation / changelogs: https://github.com/changesets/changesets

🦋 Publicando com changesets

Open source libraries and frameworks share a common necessity: the need to develop multiple packages cohesively and efficiently while managing their versioning and publishing to NPM. Nx has emerged as a go-to choice for handling such open source monorepos (as we'll explore further in the next section of this blog post). Until recently, one area Nx did not address directly was versioning and release management. Traditionally, this gap has been filled with tools like release-it, changesets, or custom Node scripts, similar to our approach in the Nx repository.

Doing these tasks by hand can quickly become a hassle. If you're open to receiving contributions from others, it can be an even bigger headache. In this post we'll cover how to use changesets to automate all of these steps.