Turborepo

Turborepo is a monorepo manager for building JavaScript and TypeScript projects. Turborepo allows a developer to make many different applications using shared code (called packages).

Uh, what?#

Alright, let me try that again.

If you don't know what a monorepo is yet, go check the definition for that one first.

🎶 elevator music 🎶

Okay, welcome back.

Now that a developer has bunch of code in a monorepo, they can (theoretically) have an easier time working with the products they are supposed to be building.

However, once there starts being a ton of code, it becomes really difficult to keep everything straight. There ends up being a ton of overhead for making everything work together properly.

Here comes Turborepo#

This is where Turborepo comes in. Turborepo takes all of the pieces and parts of the codebase and pastes them together so that you can have a workflow that you don't have to worry about. This is useful during all three big stages of making an app happen: developing, building, and running.

More advanced features of Turborepo#

There are many more advanced functions of Turborepo a big one for the non-technicals to know is "remote caching."

Let's break that word down:

• Remote: Somewhere else other than where we are right now.
• Caching: Saving things for later.

What remote caching does is speeds up workflows - everywhere.

Turborepo has a bunch of juice packed into it that allows it to report to a caching server in the cloud where it will remember what builds look like. The first time that it sees a certain build happen, it will go ahead and do that build process. However, the second time it sees that same build happening, it will stop the building process and grab the "old" one that already exists.

It's the same code. Why wait for it to build again? So, instead of me having to wait for the build process to happen again for the exact same build, I'm going to have it instantly!