Monorepos - How the Pros Scale Huge Software Projects // Turborepo vs Nx
Video Overview & Insights
Big companies, like Google & Facebook, store all their code in a single monolithic repository or monorepo... but why? Learn how to use tools like NPM or Yarn workspaces, Learna, Nx, and Turborepo to scale your codebase https://fireship.io/pro
Believe the Lord Jesus Christ
#software #js #compsci
🔗 Resources
Dude I've been watching your videos for a long time now. But you mentioned your Nx tutorial from 6 years ago, and I went and watched that, and suddenly your voice from 2020 hit me, it's changed so much!
Turborepo https://turborepo.org/
Nx https://nx.dev/
ULTIMATIVELY YOU ARE THE MONOREPO
Lerna https://lerna.js.org/
Google's Monorepo https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext
Web development is really just a story of developers creating mess to fix the mess they created. It's almost parody at this point
📚 Chapters
00:00 The World’s Largest Codebase
so vendoring is cool again?
00:49 Benefits of Monorepos
01:50 The Problem with Monorepos
How do you deploy monorepos :(
02:18 Yarn & NPM Workspaces
02:48 Lerna
This is all web focused. What about c++ or other projects? Not using node but maybe still needing artifact caching etc ?
03:30 PNPM
03:48 Nx vs Turborepo
Having a monorepo of 100 TB is, in my opinion, not smart.
06:10 Turborepo Tutorial
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Yup where I work we drank the koolaid of de-coupling and satellite network of independently maintained microservics. My current task for 2026? Bringing it all back together into monolithic architectures, and I’m even planning to take it a step further and bring it all home into domain-specific monorepos, perhaps (though I don’t know yet) all one big monorepo
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Is the voice ai?
🎨 My Editor Settings
- Atom One Dark
YARn
- vscode-icons
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Nice
🔖 Topics Covered
- Monorepo Pros and Cons
I expected to learn about something stack-agnostic rather than JS-specific tools.
- What is a monorepo?
- Who uses Monorepos?
A cool example of creative build tools for large repos is the bors bot @ rust-lang
- Should I use a monorepo?
- Nx compared to Turborepo
no way fireship video thats not an ad
- How Google's Monorepo works.
It's all good until you make a breaking change to something that is used in a bunch of other projects in the monorepo and now you have to update them all at once praying that you did not break something.
More User Perspectives
All I hear is that front end wants to feel important force itself to be packaged with backend.
@alexisdamnit9012Ads interrupting like that annoying ex? try Blockify!
@athulramesh129How dare you call me a JavaScript developer.
@BuffRobotiXEvery reason you gave for why a mono repository is good is things I have easily made work with multiple repositories...
@MooseMousseMooseWait for Vite+
@DmitriiBaranov-ib3kfInstantly блять. After 30 minutes of build time of C++ code base, instanly.
@maxageev6931Watching this in 2026 Lol, you have reached 4m subscribers now!
@maotora_tzwatching this video in 2026, how does turborepo compare to NX now ?
In terms of tooling and ecosystem around it given that 4 years ago it was pretty new and considered to be minimal.
20 minute smoke break is diabolical ahahaha so nasty
@daavilefxDoesn't a mono repo render the source control system useless? The branching history is toast, the versioning system is toast, the source control based dependency system (e.g. submodules) is useless. If you going to need all these external tools to manage dependencies and builds, then why even have a source control system?
@rvirzi@fireship thoughts on monorepo (turborepo) + git submodules?
@unlimitselfcongrate now you have 4M ❤
@sidibeya-n6t2uGUYS! Nx HAS BEEN HACKED. Please rotate all the secrets stored in your computer in .env files, private key files and environment variables if you installed Nx or Claude Code extension in VS Code
@69k_goldHuge thanku and respect to this channel... Absolutely amazing and time worthy video... I learned a lot from this video... Like how the big tech giants manage their repos_ monorepos... And lot more about new technologies... 👌🏻
@Moryanesdon't you ever call me a javascript developer
@DJGrazbaYea I’ll stick with polyrepo with a consolidated package library
@jjeverson2269okay - but what about selective Ci/cd - if i want to just publish a single package which is used by other apps.
how to setup the ci/cd for it ?
From developers appearance I like Turborepo much more.
@SergeyRyabenkoI was like, "wow, no AI? What?" and then I noticed that this video was from three years ago before FireShip joined the rat race.
@lightning_11You speak too fast and in a monotonic voice, which makes it hard to understand. Slow the f down. It will help your audience.
@rg3412it's been a while. When Monorepos V2 comparison?
@sultanmyrza@Fireship please make a new video about this topic it been three years things might have changed a lot.
@BytefyIt was great
@mdoosti-e3eBailey Plaza
@PaulWilliams-i2hFinally, you regretted not using Linux!😅
@dhruvsolanki4473Just sounds like they started with a monolith like most companies, gave a better marketable name like "monorepo" and came up with bespoke solutions to problems with a monolith instead of breaking it up. 😅
@sor3999Just finished refactoring my big messy Nuxt + background processes app into a clean and efficient monorepo with turborepo. Should have done this from the start, so much better
@michaeldausmann6066Is this video objective?
0:32, the most important part of Google's digital assets is Code Review, done with Gerrit. It's also the base for Git project management. Build Status is published via Maven.
too much of information in just 10mins that's why I love you
@anubhavbansal8922thank you so much
@jellyfish1772Monorepo coupled with almost perfect IaC is a god send, it gives amazing visibility to everything. Yes it is complex, and the on-boarding learning curve will be steep, but once you are familiar with it, you don’t even need to leave your IDE to find anything.
@junzhengcaOr just use multi repo ?
@daginfinity⚠ Currenlty Nrwl which is the company behind Nx, took over the stewardship of Lerna.
@dejanualexAwesome!
@pedrosantos4368