debian-mirror-gitlab/doc/user/packages/workflows/monorepo.md

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Monorepo package management workflows

Oftentimes, one project or Git repository may contain multiple different sub-projects 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 has its own specific files and instructions to follow to publish a given package.

Here, we take a 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 configuration with CLI commands like npm config set, or saving a .npmrc file in the root of the project specifying these configuration 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 needs its own package.json file, which can be added manually or using npm init. It also needs 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 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 can publish Foo separately from MyProject

A similar process could be followed for Conan packages, instead of dealing with .npmrc and package.json, you just deal 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 is to be uploaded to. If you set this to any project that you have access to and update any other configuration similarly depending on the package type, your packages are 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 publishes 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.

image: node:latest

stages:
  - build

build-foo-package:
  stage: build
  variables:
    PACKAGE: "Foo"
  script:
    - cd src/components/Foo
    - echo "Building $PACKAGE"
    - npm publish
  only:
    refs:
      - master
      - merge_requests
    changes:
      - "src/components/Foo/**/*"

build-my-project-package:
  stage: build
  variables:
    PACKAGE: "MyPackage"
  script:
    - echo "Building $PACKAGE"
    - npm publish
  only:
    refs:
      - master
      - merge_requests
  except:
    changes:
      - "src/components/Foo/**/*"