Overview

Turborepo is a build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos: codebases containing multiple projects, often using multiple frameworks, in a single unified code repository. Monorepos have many advantages, but they require appropriate tooling in order to scale. Turborepo leverages advanced build system ideas and techniques to speed up development, without the configuration and complexity. By abstracting the configurations, scripts, and tooling, Turborepo allows you to start shipping fast.

You can incrementally adopt Turborepo for new and existing projects. To create a new monorepo, get started with:

npx create-turbo@latest

You can also clone a Turborepo starter repository to get a head start on your monorepo. To see Turborepo examples and starters, see the Turborepo examples directory on GitHub.

Add Turborepo to your existing monorepo#

turbo works with Yarn, npm, and pnpm on the following operating systems:

• macOS darwin 64-bit (Intel), ARM 64-bit (Apple Silicon)
• Linux 32-bit, 64-bit, ARM, ARM 64-bit, MIPS 64-bit Little Endian, PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian, IBM Z 64-bit Big Endian
• Windows 32-bit, 64-bit, ARM 64-bit
• FreeBSD 64-bit, ARM 64-bit
• NetBSD AMD64
• Android ARM 64-bit

Configure workspaces#

turbo is built on top of Workspaces, a way of managing multiple packages from within a single monorepo package. Turborepo is compatible with the workspace implementations from all package managers. For more information on managing your Turborepo workspaces, see the Workspaces documentation.

You can configure workspaces any way you want, but a common folder structure example is keeping applications in the /apps folder and packages in the /packages folder. The configuration of these folders is different for each package manager.

{
 "workspaces": [
   "packages/*",
   "apps/*"
  ]
}

{
 "workspaces": [
   "packages/*",
   "apps/*"
  ]
}

packages:
  - "packages/*"
  - "apps/*"

After configuring your workspaces, re-run your package manager's install command.

Install turbo#

Add turbo as a development dependency in the root of your monorepo.

npm install turbo -D

yarn add turbo -DW

pnpm add turbo -Dw

The turbo package is a little shell that will install the proper turbo-<os>-<arch> package for you operating system and architecture.

Create turbo.json#

In the root of your monorepo, create an empty file named turbo.json. This will hold the configuration for Turborepo.

If your git repo's base branch is not origin/master, then you need to specify a baseBranch too. For example, origin/main.

{
  "$schema": "https://turborepo.org/schema.json",
  "baseBranch": "origin/main"
}

Create a pipeline#

To define your monorepo's task dependency graph, use the pipeline key in the turbo.json configuration file at the root of monorepo. turbo interprets this configuration to optimally schedule, execute, and cache the outputs of each of the package.json scripts defined in your workspaces.

Each key in the pipeline object is the name of a package.json script that can be executed by turbo run. You can specify its dependencies with the dependsOn key beneath it as well as some other options related to caching. For more information on configuring your pipeline, see the Pipelines documentation.

Packages that do not have the specified script defined in their package.json's list of scripts will be ignored by turbo.

{
  "$schema": "https://turborepo.org/schema.json",
  "pipeline": {
    "build": {
      // A package's `build` script depends on that package's
      // dependencies' and devDependencies'
      // `build` tasks  being completed first
      // (the `^` symbol signifies `upstream`).
      "dependsOn": ["^build"],
      // note: output globs are relative to each package's `package.json`
      // (and not the monorepo root)
      "outputs": [".next/**"]
    },
    "test": {
      // A package's `test` script depends on that package's
      // own `build` script being completed first.
      "dependsOn": ["build"],
      "outputs": [],
      // A package's `test` script should only be rerun when
      // either a `.tsx` or `.ts` file has changed in `src` or `test` folders.
      "inputs": ["src/**/*.tsx", "src/**/*.ts", "test/**/*.ts", "test/**/*.tsx"]
    },
    "lint": {
      // A package's `lint` script has no dependencies and
      // can be run whenever. It also has no filesystem outputs.
      "outputs": []
    },
    "deploy": {
      // A package's `deploy` script depends on the `build`,
      // `test`, and `lint` scripts of the same package
      // being completed. It also has no filesystem outputs.
      "dependsOn": ["build", "test", "lint"],
      "outputs": []
    }
  }
}

The rough execution order for a given package based on the dependsOn keys:

1. build once its upstream dependencies have run their build commands
2. test once its own build command is finished and has no filesystem outputs (just logs) within a package
3. lint runs in an arbitrary order as it has no upstream dependencies
4. deploy once its own build, test, and lint commands have finished.

After execution, the full pipline can run:

npx turbo run build test lint deploy

turbo will then schedule the execution of each task(s) to optimize usage of the machine's resources.

Edit .gitignore#

Add .turbo to your .gitignore file. The CLI uses these folders for logs and certain task outputs.

+ .turbo

Make sure that your task artifacts, the files and folders you want cached, are also included in your .gitignore.

+ build/**
+ dist/**
+ .next/**

Re-run your npm client's install command to check your configuration.

Create package.json scripts#

Add or update scripts in your monorepo's root package.json file and have them delegate to turbo.

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "turbo run build",
    "test": "turbo run test",
    "lint": "turbo run lint",
    "dev": "turbo run dev"
  }
}

Build your monorepo#

npm run build

yarn build

pnpm build

Depending on your monorepo setup, some artifacts might already be caching properly. In the next sections, we'll show how turbo works, how scope works, and then how to get caching working after that.

Configure Remote Caching#

A major key 🔑 to Turborepo's speed is that it is both lazy and efficient—it does the least amount of work possible and it tries to never redo work that's already been done before.

At the moment, Turborepo caches your tasks on your local filesystem (i.e. "single-player mode," if you will). However, what if there was a way to take advantage of the computational work done by your teammates or your CI (i.e. "co-op multiplayer mode")? What if there was a way to teleport and share a single cache across machines? Almost like a "Dropbox" for your Turborepo cache.

Remote Caching has entered the chat.

Turborepo can use a technique known as Remote Caching to share cache artifacts across machines for an additional speed boost.

Using Remote Caching for Local development#

Turborepo uses Vercel as its default remote caching provider. If you want to link your local turborepo to your Remote Cache you can authenticate the Turborepo CLI with your Vercel account:

npx turbo login

Then, link your turborepo to your remote cache:

npx turbo link

Once enabled, make some changes to a package or application you are currently caching and run tasks against it with turbo run. Your cache artifacts will now be stored locally and in your Remote Cache. To verify that this worked, delete your local Turborepo cache:

rm -rf ./node_modules/.cache/turbo

Run the same build again. If things are working properly, turbo should not execute tasks locally, but rather download both the logs and artifacts from your Remote Cache and replay them back to you.

npx turbo login --sso-team=<team-slug>

Next Steps#

You're now up and running with Turborepo, but there are still a few things to do:

• Understand how Turborepo caching works
• Correctly handle environment variables
• Learn to orchestrate task running with pipelines
• Efficiently filter package tasks
• Configure Turborepo with your CI provider