Monorepo: NX + Lerna vs SUI Tools

[turolopezsanabria]

Preconditions

For the POC we've used Lerna and NX combined.
We did not try Turborepo but can be considered as well (although Nx is more powerful though)

Decision

We will go with Lerna.
It will allow us to go fast, as it is a good standard in the industry (in comparison SUI Tools)
During the POC we tested NX in combination with Lerna, but had a hard time, so we stick to Lerna only.

Lerna

https://lerna.js.org/

If configured, Lerna could be used to:

• Populate changelog
• Update automatically semver based on conventional commits
• detect changed packages
• publish packages on the registry

Pros

• Super easy to use to setup workspaces and some commands to trigger tests in all packages, etc.
• Seems easy to use for package publishing (Julien)
• We don't need to bother creating and maintaining our own tools
• Automatically links your packages (Lerna reads "workspaces" in the package.json)

Cons / Risks

• Learning curve
• There are a lot of commands and options, but we can get inspiration from what's already in Brikke

NX

https://nx.dev/

Pros

• Any?

Cons / Risks

• NX: I was lost in the documentation, it felt like I needed two weeks doing a special NX course to start being good at it. I had a "webpack" feeling, where everything was hard to setup (Julien)
• Can be hard to understand the documentation. They’re aware of it and are working on it
• Earning curve for CLI
• NX feature that seems nice but I couldn't make it work is that it offers "generators" to boostrap a specific type of package in the monorepo. For example, a "typescript react component". But in reality, the package generated didn't suit what we needed and I ended having to rewrite each file. I'm sure there is a way to create our own "templates" for packages for NX to generate, but I didn't make it work :)

SUI Mono

Oficial doc

Pros

• any?

Cons / Risks

• We need to evolve it, maintain it, etc
• It doesn't provide all the features that Lerna and NX provide out of the box