Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up? • Hacker News Board

Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#1

Post by ashiban » Mon, May 13, 2024, 6:59 PM UTC

Hello friends! We're designing our next iteration of deployment tooling, and wanted to get a feel for whether startups with Do you -

1. Mono-repo (frontend + backends + services + infra [...]) all in 1 repo)

2. Multi-repo (separate out frontend, from backend / each services /) or any other cross-repo structure

What's your guys' structure?

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#2

Post by Eridrus » Mon, May 13, 2024, 7:25 PM UTC

Monorepo with pants for builds, 4 Engineers.

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#3

Post by aranchelk » Mon, May 13, 2024, 7:56 PM UTC

Monorepo for client and services - enough code sharing that it would be pretty weird to separate them out.

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#4

Post by fullstick » Mon, May 13, 2024, 9:51 PM UTC

We were on a mono-repo and we're moving to multi-repo with the goal of increasing release frequency.

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#5

Post by moomoo11 » Tue, May 14, 2024, 1:18 AM UTC

I have 4 repos.

All the backend work is in one repo. The monolith has everything including the core API services, background/batch processing, etc.

I have a mobile repo but we aren't ready at all yet to work on mobile. It is a flutter app, but mostly proof of concept type stuff.

Then there's 2 repos for web UI. One is a next js app for generating applications for customers, and the other is a standard react SPA which is what customers use to build their applications.

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#6

Post by lbhdc » Tue, May 14, 2024, 2:07 PM UTC

Monorepo, it has made sharing code and tools a lot easier.

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#7

Post by kypro » Tue, May 14, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

fullstick wrote: post #4

We were on a mono-repo and we're moving to multi-repo with the goal of increasing release frequency.

Why is a monorepo blocking you from increasing release frequency? Are you releasing all components together or something?

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#8

Post by noop_joe » Tue, May 14, 2024, 3:27 PM UTC

We are building an application/infra platform, Noop [0], it's multi-repo, one key benefit is it facilitates the deployment of different system components with greater isolation.

That said, I'm a big fan of mono-repo. Noop actually supports developing mono-repos in a really interesting way. Here's an example [1] Vue + Node backend in one app. It should be pretty straightforward to see how you might be able to extrapolate that to more services when needed by looking at the .noop/blueprint.yaml in the linked repo.

0. https://noop.dev 1. https://github.com/noop-inc/template-nodejs-vue

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#9

Post by seattle_spring » Tue, May 14, 2024, 9:37 PM UTC

Monorepo, no question. Has had only upside as far as I've experienced.

Re: Ask HN: Startups – Are you on a monorepo or multi-repo set up?

#10

Post by theolivenbaum » Wed, May 15, 2024, 5:17 AM UTC

Mono-repo, mono-language, and really enjoying it - enables much easier refactoring and using a single strongly typed language makes lots of issues go away. We do have a few other repos for open source projects or libraries we publish, but the majority of the work is done on our mono-repo.