Monorepos in the Wild
Monolithic approaches to software development have quite a bad reputation, and rightfully so. Modularization and micro services dictate the current landscape especially in the web development world.
But still there is a relatively new trend coming up which — at first glance — seems to contradict the push for modularization. The Monorepo. Although, Monorepos are not in the least incompatible with modular software development practices — quite the opposite — managing code in a single repository can simplify the development process of modular software projects, like micro services based infrastructures, tremendously.
Not only big tech giants like Google and Facebook are using monolithic approaches for managing their enormous codebases. Also popular open source projects like Babel or React are successfully using Monorepos to maintain all their official packages in a single repository.
Although there are many benefits building modular software which consists of multiple packages (intended to be published in a package management system like Composer or npm) in a single repository, it is not without its own problems and challenges. The developers behind the Babel project have built a tool called Lerna which can help to streamline the npm publishing workflow of Monorepo based projects.
