Single-package workspaces

While Turborepo is highly effective in multi-package workspaces (commonly referred to as monorepos), it can also be used to make single-package workspaces faster.

Turborepo's most important features work in single-package workspaces including local and Remote Caching and task parallelization. Features that don't work are ones that don't make sense in the context of a single package, like package tasks (app#build).

Installation

Install turbo into your application:

npm install turbo --save-dev

Running a package.json script using global turbo (optional)

For even faster developer workflows, you can install turbo globally, too, and run commands directly from the command line.

Once installed, you can run turbo build and Turborepo will run your build script from package.json. Running turbo build again will hit the cache.

At this point, turbo isn't providing much value since you're likely to only be rebuilding your application when code changes and, when your code changes, turbo will miss the cache. In two short steps, you can get more out of turbo.

Running many scripts with one command

In many repositories, there are setup tasks or pre-build steps to run. These tasks are often run one at a time - but you can easily turn them into one script with turbo.

For example, let's say you have a project where we always have to set up a development environment whenever you start working. You need to:

1. Start a Docker container for a database.
2. Push a database schema to the database.
3. Seed the database with data.
4. Start the development server.

You can schedule these tasks into one command using Turborepo. First, create scripts in your package.json:

{
  "name": "@acme/my-app",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "next dev",
    "build": "next build",
    "start": "next start",
    "lint": "next lint",
    "check-types": "tsc --noEmit",
    "db:up": "docker-compose up -d",
    "db:push": "your-orm-tool schema-push",
    "db:seed": "node ./db-seed.js"
  }
}

Then, create tasks in turbo.json to run these scripts in order:

{
  "tasks": {
    "dev": {
      "dependsOn": ["db:seed"],
      "cache": false,
      "persistent": true
    },
    "db:seed": {
      "dependsOn": ["db:push"],
      "cache": false
    },
    "db:push": {
      "dependsOn": ["db:up"],
      "cache": false
    },
    "db:up": {
      "cache": false
    }
  }
}

The dependsOn arrays in the tasks above create a sequential order for the tasks. When you run turbo dev (either as a package.json script or in your terminal),

Parallelizing tasks

Using turbo to parallelize tasks results in speeding up tasks by running all at once, when they can be. For instance, you can run your ESLint, TypeScript, and Prettier checks at the same time. Given scripts like:

{
  "scripts": {
    "lint": "eslint .",
    "format": "prettier .",
    "check-types": "tsc --noEmit"
  }
}

You can create a configuration like this one:

{
  "tasks": {
    "lint": {},
    "format": {},
    "check-types": {}
  }
}

Then, to run all tasks at the same time:

turbo check-types lint format

Optimizing task using inputs

Because Turborepo will treat a single-package workspace as one package, it can help to optimize inputs to tasks to make sure unrelated changes don't create cache misses.

For instance, a script for checking types using tsc --noEmit can be configured with inputs that only include TypeScript files:

{
  "tasks": {
    "check-types": {
      "inputs": ["**/*.{ts,tsx}"]
    }
  }
}