lerna VS nx

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.

Just use react.... That's what I do - it is so much easier than trying to fight with Next.js.

I have a large application and I use next.js for the landing pages (landing, tos, privacy, blog, login, etc..) - but for the core application after login, I just use vanilla react with react router. For me I keep these as separate applications as I don't want to load the entire app just for the landing page or login box.

Every time I need to work in the nextjs part of the app I always run into problems and have to read the docs and troubleshoot, sift through which part of the docs apply to my setup versus the app router.

If your entire application needs to be indexed as a static site (e.g. content based versus a web application), then vanilla react isn't a good fit - so it depends on your needs.

Unrelated - but shout out to https://nx.dev. I always prefer using this for all of my projects - made it super easy to have my node backend, react frontend, nextjs landing page, chrome extension, cron jobs, etc.. all in the same codebase where I can share code between all of them via non-publishable libraries.

Nx Documentation

However, the potential for future improvements make it a promising approach for large-scale monorepos. As the Nx team works on supporting TypeScript better (see Nx 2025 roadmap), we can expect progress in this area.

Finally, NX allows us to extend its capabilities with custom plugins and generators to automate workflows, create boilerplates, and manage continuous migrations. This helps developers evolve the codebase over time with minimal effort as new features are introduced or technologies change.

Analog is excited to have Zerops as our new official deployment partner. We are thankful for the trust and support of the entire Zerops team. Because of their support, in addition to our other sponsors, SnyderTech, Jonathan Gamble, and Nx that we are able to receive ongoing maintenance and keep developing Analog for the long term in a financially sustainable way.

The software is fully written in TypeScript and organized as an Nx workspace, utilizing the latest framework releases. The backend is based on NestJS in combination with PostgreSQL as a database together with Prisma and Redis for caching. The frontend is built with Angular.

If you're using Nx, update your project.json storybook targets to run the Storybook commands:

I've been using (Nx)[https://nx.dev/] for a while now, but primarily on a front end set of apps currently. While it started as a TS/JS monorepo tool, it has evolved into something that (they claim) can be used for just about any language. You will probably still see it's roots as a TS/JS based tool though. It's not been without it's challenges, but overall I'm fairly happy with it.

For others searching (alternative) generic build caching tool supporting mono-repos:

Nx - https://nx.dev/.