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Monorepo package management workflows
Oftentimes, one project or Git repository may contain multiple different subprojects or submodules that all get packaged and published individually.
Publishing different packages to the parent project
The number and name of packages you can publish to one project is not limited. You can accomplish this by setting up different configuration files for each package. See the documentation for the package manager of your choice since each will have its own specific files and instructions to follow to publish a given package.
Here, we will walk through how to do this with NPM.
Let us say we have a project structure like so:
MyProject/
|- src/
| |- components/
| |- Foo/
|- package.json
MyProject is the parent project, which contains a sub-project Foo in the
components directory. We would like to publish packages for both MyProject
as well as Foo.
Following the instructions in the
GitLab NPM registry documentation,
publishing MyProject consists of modifying the package.json file with a
publishConfig section, as well as either modifying your local NPM config with
CLI commands like npm config set, or saving a .npmrc file in the root of the
project specifying these config settings.
If you follow the instructions you can publish MyProject by running
npm publish from the root directory.
Publishing Foo is almost exactly the same, you simply have to follow the steps
while in the Foo directory. Foo will need its own package.json file,
which can be added manually or using npm init. And it will need its own
configuration settings. Since you are publishing to the same place, if you
used npm config set to set the registry for the parent project, then no
additional setup is necessary. If you used a .npmrc file, you will need an
additional .npmrc file in the Foo directory (be sure to add .npmrc files
to the .gitignore file or use environment variables in place of your access
tokens to prevent them from being exposed). It can be identical to the
one you used in MyProject. You can now run npm publish from the Foo
directory and you will be able to publish Foo separately from MyProject
A similar process could be followed for Conan packages, instead of dealing with
.npmrc and package.json, you will just be dealing with conanfile.py in
multiple locations within the project.
Publishing to other projects
A package is associated with a project on GitLab, but the package does not
need to be associated with the code in that project. Notice when configuring
NPM or Maven, you only use the Project ID to set the registry URL that the
package will be uploaded to. If you set this to any project that you have
access to and update any other config similarly depending on the package type,
your packages will be published to that project. This means you can publish
multiple packages to one project, even if their code does not exist in the same
place. See the project registry workflow documentation
for more details.
CI workflows for automating packaging
CI pipelines open an entire world of possibilities for dealing with the patterns described in the previous sections. A common desire would be to publish specific packages only if changes were made to those directories.
Using the example project above, this gitlab-ci.yml file will publish
Foo anytime changes are made to the Foo directory on the master branch,
and publish MyPackage anytime changes are made to anywhere except the Foo
directory on the master branch.
stages:
- build
.default-rule: &default-rule
if: '$CI_MERGE_REQUEST_IID || $CI_COMMIT_REF_SLUG == "master"'
.foo-package:
variables:
PACKAGE: "Foo"
before_script:
- cd src/components/Foo
only:
changes:
- "src/components/Foo/**/*"
.parent-package:
variables:
PACKAGE: "MyPackage"
except:
changes:
- "src/components/Foo/**/*"
.build-package:
stage: build
script:
- echo "Building $PACKAGE"
- npm publish
rules:
- <<: *default-rule
build-foo-package:
extends:
- .build-package
- .foo-package
build-my-project-package:
extends:
- .build-package
- .parent-package