Using Workspaces in a Monorepo Project with vlt

Using Workspaces in a Monorepo Project with vlt

When using the vlt client, you can define multiple different workspaces in a single monorepo project.

The vlt client supports workspaces defined by glob patterns, and you can also define named groups to perform vlt operations on a specific subset of your workspaces.

Defining Workspaces

To use monorepo features, create a vlt.json file in the root of your project with a workspaces field.

At its most explicit, the workspaces field can be an object with group names as the keys, and either a single string or an array of strings to identify the workspace paths in each group. The strings are interpreted as glob patterns, so if a path has glob special characters that should be interpreted literally, use the \ character to escape them.

For example:

{
  "workspaces": {
    "www": "www/*"
    "utils": [
      "utils/*",
      "www/utils"
    ],
  }
}

It’s perfectly fine for a workspace to be found in multiple groups, like the www/utils workspace in the example above.

If that level of group detail isn’t needed, then you can also just point the workspaces field at a string or array of string glob patterns. For example:

{
  "workspaces": ["www/*", "utils/*"]
}

Or even:

{
  "workspaces": "packages/*"
}

Working with Workspaces

The simplest way to peform an option on a single workspace is to just cd into that folder, and then use whatever vlt operation as you would normally. Any installations will be added as dependencies to that single workspace, scripts will be run in that workspace only, etc.

If you want to work with multiple workspaces at one time, there are a few options.

Running Commands on All Workspaces

You can use the -r --recursive flag to run a script across all workspaces in the monorepo project.

For example:

$ vlt run --recursive test

will run the test script in all workspaces.

Running Commands on Specific Workspaces By Path

To run a command on certain workspaces by their path, you can use the -w<path> --workspace=<path> configuration option.

For example, to run the tests on certain workspaces by path name, you can run this:

$ vlt --workspace=src/* --workspace=www/components run test

would run the test command on all the workspaces under src/*, as well as the www/components workspace.

Note that glob patterns may have to be quoted so that the shell does not expand them incorrectly.

Running Commands on Specific Workspaces By Group

If you had configured your workspaces into named groups, then you can reference those groups using the -g<name> --workspace-group=<name> configuration option.

For example, with the vlt.json defined above:

{
  "workspaces": {
    "www": "www/*"
    "utils": [
      "utils/*",
      "www/utils"
    ],
  }
}

we could do:

$ vlt -g utils run test

to run tests on all our utils workspaces.