What is Monorepo and its Benefits and challenge

What is a Monorepo and best pratices?

When we say about the monorepo, we can say that monorepo can foster rapid development workflows. In this below article we will provide detail on monorepo which will help you to get how monorepo fit for you and for your company.

What is a Monorepo

Well Monorepo is a version controlled code repository which will holds many projects or we can say multiple project at one location. May be these projects are connected with each other and most of the time these are logically independent and these are run by different teams.

For more detail on Monorepo we can say that some of the companies will host all of their code in a single repository which is shared with everyone. And monorepos can be reach at colossal sizes. Just like Google which is theorized to have the largest code repository ever, which have n number of commits per day and have over 80 TBs large. There are other companies too which have the very large monorepos that are Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook.

Sometime monorepos are called monolithic repositories, but they should not be confused with monolithic architecture. And monolithic architecture is a software development practice for writing self-contained applications. An example of this is a Ruby on Rails monolith handling websites, API endpoints, and background jobs.

Benefits and challenges of Monorepo?

(1)Top benefit of Monorepos is that monorepo can help teams to almost instantly start write a clean and maintainable code.

(2)When we say about the testing in Monorepo running automated code tests, unit testing , integration test and end-to-end testing is much much

(3)When we say about the dependencies in Monorepo it is very easier to manage dependencies by virtue of providing easier access to them.

(4)Monorepor can help with refactoring solutions and documenting flows so when a new member joins the team itâ€™s easy for them to integrate into existing practices.

(5)Well another feature of Monorepo is that this will centralize colloboration, communication within teams should be more effective. Everyone will be clear on the needs and priorities of the team.

(6)Monorepos can support an organizational culture of collaboration and support. When code is shared inside a monorepo, it means the challenges different teams face are also shared, making it easier to solve them together.

(7)If you can select an adequate means of managing your code you can minimize potential chaos in the codebase. And a good example of this is using domain-driven design (DDD), so each business domain that works on the code can be easily administered.

(8)Once there is breking changes in APIs or any of shared libraries are eposed immediately. From that different teams will communicate ahead and join foces and everyone is invested in keeping up with changes.

(9)As all of the dependency have the same version which means there is no version conflicts and no dependency hell.

(10)Another important feature of this is atomic commits make large-scale refactoring easier. And a developer can update several packages or peojects in a single commit.

(11)We can use a shared build process for every application in repo.

(12)In Monorepor enforcing code quality standards and a unified style is easier when you have all your codebase in one place.

Challenges of Monorepo?

(1)One of the main disadvantages of monorepo is performance as we have have a combine code of different functions and context in single repository this can slow down tha code pull operations.

(2)If any of the organization will decide to move there code/project from Monorepo to Multirepo you must aware that this could lead to significant costs in term of both time and effort.

(3)If you have many sub-projects in a repository it is important to consider about the CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) tyep integration is become big challenge. And it is also useful to know in advance if there are DevOps teams or individuals who can facilitate this way of managing code.

(4)This is very important to evaluate the scalability of a monorepo; doing so allows us to establish early strategies to mitigate potential challenges as we scale. And a pattern that can be valuable in this context is hexagonal architecture. And some commands like "git blame" will take a long time. And IDEs begin to lag and productivity suffers, and testing the whole repo on every commit becomes infeasible.

(5)When we say about the secuirty for Monorepo this can make security difficult, because, unlike other types of repositories, here you are granting a person who may only work on part of the project complete access to a codebase. Ideally, there should be independence between mono-repo projects; the versioning of each one should be established from the beginning to make it easier to deal with issues such as integrations and team coordination in relation to the maintenance of different code bases.

(6)When we say about the learning process for Monorepo for new developer it is steeper if your repository spans many tightly couple projects.

(7)Some time commits per change are very huge which will need a lots of cost for big projects.

(8)When we say about the Monorepo notifications , this can be very noisy. For instance, GitHub has limited notifications settings that are not best suited for a snow slide of pull requests and code reviews.

(9)When we say about the ownership of files it is very challenging as systems like Git or Mercurial donâ€™t feature built-in directory permissions.

Best Pratices for Monorepo Management

Below are the best pratices for Monorepo management which is based on different Monorepo stories:-

(1)Must define a unified directory organization for easy discovery.

(2)Always maintain branch hygine by keeping branches small and always consider to dopt trunk-based development.

(3)Try to use CODEOWERS when you need to restrict access to certain projects.

(4)Always try to shop around for a smart build system like Bazel or Buck to speed up building and testing.

(5)Always try to pinned dependencies for every project. Upgrade dependencies all at once, force every project to keep up with the dependencies. Reserve exceptions for truly exceptional cases.

(6)Well if you choose Git you must know how to use shallow clone and filter-branch to handle large-volume repositories.

(7)Try to use a cloud CI/CD platform such as Semaphore to test and deploy your applications at scale.

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