In this video I’ll compare monorepo tools such as Lerna/Yarn workspaces/PNPM workspaces with Nx. The video walks you through the steps of adding Nx to a Lerna repo and showing many affordances Nx offers. Although the video uses Lerna, everything said applies to Yarn or PNPM. Basically, any time I say “Lerna” you can substitute it for Yarn or PNPM.

Clarifying Misconceptions

Misconception: You have to choose between Nx and Lerna.

Lerna, Yarn workspaces, pnpm workspaces offer the following affordances for developing multiple projects in the same repo:

• Deduping node_modules. If I use the same version of say Next.js in all the projects, the package is installed once.
• Task orchestration. If I want to test all the projects, I can use a single command to do it.
• Publishing (Lerna only). I can run one command to publish packages to NPM.

This is what Nx offers:

• Smart rebuilds of affected projects
• Distributed task execution & computation caching
• Code sharing and ownership management
• High-quality editor plugins & GitHub apps
• Powerful code generators
• Workspace visualizations
• Rich plugin ecosystem
• Consistent dev experience for any framework
• Automatic upgrade to latest versions of all frameworks and tools

#nextjs #react #nx #angular #node