Deciding whether to adopt a monorepo, especially with a tool like Turborepo, depends on your team's size, project interdependencies, and organizational structure.
A monorepo with Turborepo is an excellent choice for:
- Multiple interdependent projects: When applications share a common UI library, utility functions, or API clients.
- Large teams: Where consistent dependency versions, simplified refactoring, and atomic changes across projects are critical.
- Performance-sensitive CI/CD: Teams struggling with long build times in their polyrepo setup and needing faster feedback loops.
- Shared tooling: When standardizing linting, testing, and building across many projects is beneficial.
However, a monorepo might not be ideal for:
- Completely unrelated projects: If projects have no shared code or dependencies, the overhead of a monorepo might outweigh the benefits.
- Small, independent teams: Where each team has full autonomy over their codebase and minimal interaction with others.
- Strict access control needs: Monorepos can complicate fine-grained permissions management if different teams require strict isolation at the repository level.
Ultimately, Turborepo makes the monorepo a highly viable and often superior option for complex JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystems, but careful consideration of your specific context is always necessary.