I wrote last month about having migrated Buttondown from a number of separate microrepositories to a single monorepo. I've since completed the migration, and the slight irritation I felt from having to unwind a bunch of technical choices with deployment + continuous integration has faded.
I am here to tell you: if you are running a software business and you aren't at, like, Google-tier scale, just throw it all in a monorepo. I am kicking myself for not having done this to begin with.
Here is a list of I think reasonable drawbacks of having a monorepo if you are not a Google-tier company:
- You cannot apply role-based access controls to certain parts of the repository for security/compliance reasons.
- You cannot open-source certain parts of your repository. (This was the biggest sticking point for me for a while — I want, ideally, everything in Buttondown to be open-source except the core plumbing and author-facing application.)
Conversely, here are a list of things that became an order of magnitude easier now that my entire codebase is in a single repository:
- Rolling out API changes concomitantly with downstream changes to the documentation or the OpenAPI spec.
- Introducing feature-level changes and the blog post announcing those changes.
- Context-switching between different workspaces with subtly different configurations.
You may be reading this short essay and thinking: "Yeah, no shit! Of course you do not need a monorepo when you're talking about, like, 150K lines of code." Congratulations — you are sensible, and well adjusted, and certainly wiser than I was six months ago.
But I know there's a few of you out there who are clinging to something — some irrational reason why you have your welterweight project split across four separate repositories.
Maybe it's some abstract sense of purity; maybe it's because you didn't realize most IaaS let you deploy from a subfolder. Whatever the reason is: trust me. Move it into a monorepo. If you do and you end up regretting it, email me and I'll donate to the charity of your choice.
To wrap up, I will deputize two people who are smarter than I am who have also opined on the subject: