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Modularity is almost a buzzword in the JS community, and considering the amount of packages now hosted on NPM, developers are taking it to an extreme.

Consider starting a new project when modularity is at the forefront of your architectural mind; you might think you'll have 5 packages, and each will have a corresponding git repository. While this may sound like a modular dream, I can speak from experience that it isn't! These are some things that you can expect to face when you have separate git repositories that are highly dependent on each other:

• Friction around pull requests that cut across multiple packages

• Broken builds due to bad changes in separate repositories

• Time spent around pull request coordination

• Code out of sync across the different repos

Lerna to the rescue! If you are not aware of what a monorepo is, this is a good starting place, for what, why, and how; with some good previous discussion. These are some of the things that we have happily embraced as a result of using lerna:

• Code will always be in sync, one pull request will complete one feature

• Master will never be broken

• Code reviews happen in one place

• No code in dependent repos/packages

• Faster CI cycle time

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