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Monorepo package management workflows

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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. 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.