Release It! 🚀 VS lerna

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.

Hi. I'm maintaining a small monorepo and I'd like to learn techniques from large, mature projects like typescript-eslint. I assume they automate changelogs from commit logs and/or PRs, but I can't figure out how they do it by looking at their source code. I do know of tools like release-it that helps automate the process; do the typescript-eslint maintainers use such a tool, or use a homegrown one?

This is a quick start guide for setting up a NestJS project for creating your own package library with automated versioning and package publishing. https://github.com/Emgevorgyan/nestjs-package-quick-start

Release It! - This seems promising. A CLI tool that can be used in interactive or continuous integration mode. The big appeal for me is a Yarn workspaces specific plugin.

Fine, but I need a package release tool and release-it tools looks good. I install, configure and on the last step - publishing - I find out that this lib does not support monorepo... https://github.com/release-it/release-it/issues/831 and the release-it-yarn-workspaces lib does not support the latest version of release-it https://github.com/rwjblue/release-it-yarn-workspaces/issues/68

May be less relevant for your particular workflow (because npm-specific and because everything is internal for you), but I’m a big fan of an alternative in the auto-release-generation space: the combo of release-it and release-it-lerna-changelog, which give you the same kind of automation but don’t require specific git commit messages, because instead the combo uses the GH API and labels to generate the changelog. This is a muuuuuch nicer experience for external contributors, because it puts the responsibility for that back on maintainers instead.

Release It - To create tags, bump the versions, manage release betas and detect merged changes.

Release It

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.

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.