lerna VS single-spa

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.

If so, are you using a monorepo tool like Nx or Lerna? If not, start there and see if it solves your problem.

I mean I don't know what your monorepo looks like, but for example infernojs (actually written with typescript) uses lerna, and lerna seems simpler than typescript references

Tools for publishing, such as Lerna (when using the --conventional-commit flag), follow this convention when incrementing package versions and generating changelog files.

We could improve part of this by using something like Lerna. With the right configuration, Lerna can be really helpful.

It feels dirty to be adding express as a dependency to a react project, but I'm pretty sure TRPC requires all of client and server code to be in the same node.js project, since types are shared. I've read that you can use a tool like Lerna to share types between node projects, but it requires a build step, which would diminish the benefits of TRPC.

For more information, check out the PR

I’ve actually done that “web components as the interoperability layer”!

It was this old angular 1.8 app with new features being written in angular-hybrid-ized angular 8. Ripping out angular-hybrid and separating the angular 1.8 routes from the modern angular routes was difficult, but now they were totally separate.

The only thing linking them together was an object with some RXJS streams in it for state, and a little in-house wrapper “app” who just loaded one component or another depending on the URL and a hash of routes for config. (I’d probably use SingleSPA [1] now. Same thing really.)

We could deploy them separately since the build just ends up being another JS file somewhere that just gets included with a script tag at runtime. No version bumping! No big mega build!

We started replacing the remaining “old” routes 1 by 1 with a “new” counter part. That was the easiest part, and went at a pace devs were comfortable with (fast enough) and business folk could tolerate. (modular enough to not HAVE to be done all at once)

Last I checked, the angular 1.8 stuff is gone years ago. :)

[1] https://single-spa.js.org/

Module Federation is not the unique solution, for example single-spa

Single-SPA and module federation are potent tools for building scalable micro-frontends. Single-spa provides a framework for building a modular front-end application. It allows lazy loading of micro-frontends, which helps improve the application's performance. In contrast, module federation enables communication and dependency sharing between different micro-frontends. It reduces code duplication, which can help with scaling an application.

Since micro-frontend allows us to develop applications individually, this also means you can use different frameworks and libraries together to develop each section of this application. Of course, this will have some advantages and disadvantages. If you are using different technologies to serve different parts of the application, it won't be so easy to move developers within teams. However, the door is open, and if you want to do something like that, you could use something like Single SPA, or some other, to help you organize and connect the different technologies into a larger application.

Using single-spa

There are numerous micro-frontend frameworks like Single SPA, Open Components, Mosaic, and so on The configuration for these tools can get complex and difficult to manage as we add more apps since they require configuration at each layer — routing, dependency management, and development. This would complicate our tooling and hence, would not work for us.

Our web application consists of microfrontends written in React and Svelte orchestrated by the single-spa framework.

The lightweight Nest.js Import Map Resolver server has two main roles: store and update the importmap, but also handle the submission of JS assets. Single-spa has a similar solution available.