lerna VS webpack

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.

Official Website: https://webpack.js.org/

The JS SDK now lets you opt out of specific modules you don't need and optimize the final bundle size. You can do that by using either of two popular JavaScript build tools: Rollup or Webpack.

Webpack: A bundler for managing and optimizing module dependencies. Learn More

Description: A module bundler that compiles JavaScript modules (along with assets like styles and images) into a single bundle or multiple bundles for optimized loading. It also supports hot reloading and code splitting. Use Cases: Bundling and optimizing JavaScript files for production, often used in larger web projects. Website: Webpack

Webpack official website

For its part, Next.js is the most popular React framework. As any other JavaScript application that uses a bundler such as webpack or Vite, for production a compiled version of the project is used. This is known as build. A build aims to provide the minimum amount of code needed for the application to function the same as it does in development. This ensures that JavaScript files are very lightweight, allowing the browser to fetch and interpret them in the shortest possible time to render the user interface or perform whatever tasks the application requires."

Webpack manages standalone applications.

Previously, Strapi used Webpack, a free and open-source module bundler for JavaScript.

Webpack is a module bundler used to build modern JavaScript applications. It allows developers to compile modules and optimize assets in an application. A key feature of Webpack is that it is flexible in its customization, which enables it to be suitable for both small- and large-scale applications. You can install Webpack by running the command below:

Additional Resources Google Lighthouse WebPageTest TinyPNG Webpack Documentation Service Worker API