Challenge
This was an internal project. The client was Unvoid itself.
Our challenge was on two fronts:
- We had many repositories per project, and splitting the project into multiple parts introduced unnecessary complexity for onboarding and maintenance;
- We had functionalities in a repository that could be applied in another repository for the same project, but we didn't have a good way to share code besides copy and pasting.
The goal was to explore modern codebase structures that would improve our Developer Experience (DX) and, of course, our productivity.
Also, the new codebase structure would have to seamlessly integrate with our tech stack, which is mainly Angular, TypeScript, Cypress, NodeJS, Express, GitHub Actions, and Docker.
Solutions
To address these challenges, the project team proposed to implement a monorepo application structure with Nx.
This structure allows developers to manage multiple applications, libraries, and shared code in a single repository. Nx is a set of tools and libraries that helps in building scalable and maintainable applications.
The first step was to create a new repository using Nx. We then migrated all the existing applications and libraries to this new repository. This helped reduce code duplication and made it easier to manage dependencies.
We also created a set of reusable libraries that could be shared across all the applications. These libraries included common functionalities such as authentication, logging, and error handling. This reduced the development time and ensured consistency across all the applications.
We used Nx to manage the build and deployment process. Nx provides a set of commands to build and test the applications and libraries. It also integrates with popular CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, and GitHub Actions.
