Monorepo package management workflows (FREE)
One project or Git repository can contain multiple different subprojects or submodules that are all packaged and published individually.
Publishing different packages to the parent project
The number and name of packages you can publish to one project is not limited. You can accomplish this by setting up different configuration files for each package. See the documentation for the package manager of your choice since each has its own specific files and instructions to follow to publish a given package.
The example here uses NPM.
In this example, MyProject
is the parent project. It contains a sub-project Foo
in the
components
directory:
MyProject/
|- src/
| |- components/
| |- Foo/
|- package.json
The goal is to publish the packages for MyProject
and Foo
. Following the instructions in the
GitLab NPM registry documentation,
you can publish MyProject
by modifying the package.json
file with a publishConfig
section,
and by doing one of the following:
- Modify your local NPM configuration with CLI commands like
npm config set
. - Save a
.npmrc
file in the root of the project specifying these configuration settings.
If you follow the instructions, you can publish MyProject
by running npm publish
from the root
directory.
Publishing Foo
is almost exactly the same. Simply follow the same steps while in the Foo
directory. Foo
needs its own package.json
file, which you can add manually by using npm init
.
Foo
also needs its own configuration settings. Since you are publishing to the same place, if you
used npm config set
to set the registry for the parent project, then no additional setup is
necessary. If you used an .npmrc
file, you need an additional .npmrc
file in the Foo
directory.
Be sure to add .npmrc
files to the .gitignore
file or use environment variables in place of your
access tokens to prevent your tokens from being exposed. This .npmrc
file can be identical to the
one you used in MyProject
. You can now run npm publish
from the Foo
directory and you can
publish Foo
separately from MyProject
.
You could follow a similar process for Conan packages. However, instead of .npmrc
and
package.json
, you have conanfile.py
in multiple locations within the project.
Publishing to other projects
A package is associated with a project on GitLab, but the package does not need to be associated
with the code in that project. When configuring NPM or Maven, you only use the Project ID
to set
the registry URL that the package uploads to. If you set this to any project that you have access to
and update any other configuration similarly depending on the package type, your packages are
published to that project. This means you can publish multiple packages to one project, even if
their code does not exist in the same place. See the project registry workflow documentation
for more information.