Spike: Switch from lerna to pnpm workspaces

[bajtos]

Our current lerna-based setup is very inefficient. Most of the pull requests in this repository are created by RenovateBot to update package-lock files, our git history is full of RenovateBot commits that make it difficult to spot relevant changes.

Let's investigate how to switch from lerna to pnpm and use a single root package-lock file for the entire monorepo.

References:

• pnpm workspaces: https://pnpm.js.org/en/workspaces
• Travis CI setup: https://pnpm.js.org/en/continuous-integration#travis

Topics to investigate:

• How to release new versions using conventional release process? Can we perhaps use https://github.com/atlassian/changesets? Related: https://github.com/pnpm/pnpm/issues/2225
• Does RenovateBot support pnpm? If not, is there any other bot we could use instead? E.g. GitHub's Dependabot. Related: https://github.com/renovatebot/renovate/issues/2015

[InvictusMB]

Is there a reason not to use lerna + yarn? lerna is still good for versioning and automation and yarn handles hoisting and cross linking packages well.

I tried pnpm for monorepo roughly a year ago and there were too many flawed packages at the time causing pnpm strict checks to fail. Also some packages made assumptions about filesystem and misbehaved. I don't remember exactly which caused trouble but most likely those were loading plugins based on package naming conventions such as eslint. Not sure if any of that is the case today.

[hacksparrow]

@InvictusMB https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/1818#issuecomment-597888041

[raymondfeng]

I would prefer to wait until https://github.com/npm/rfcs/blob/latest/accepted/0026-workspaces.md is fully implemented. If so, the client probably won't matter.

[bajtos]

FWIW, [email protected] is available for (beta) testing now. See https://blog.npmjs.org/post/631877012766785536/release-v700

[carlosDistillery]

Hi bro, I started a project with rush and pnpm but I had some problems with the dependencies at the installation moment. Now I'm using Lerna but one question that I have is about yarn and pnpm. I can see that your question was created one year ago. Were you able to test yarn perfomrnace in monorepo?

[achrinza]

AFAIK, we've never did much testing with yarn when NPM workspaces manifested.

[bitabs]

Hi there! 👋🏻 Any update on this?

[achrinza]

No updates at the moment as there was no immediate need to migrate away from Lerna, and since there's a handful of internal monorepo scripts which depend on Lerna.