Monorepo
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A monorepo is when you put all your different projects — frontend, backend, shared libraries — in one giant single repository instead of separate repos. It makes sharing code between projects easy, but the repo gets big and tooling gets complex.
Real Talk
A monorepo is a single repository containing multiple distinct projects with well-defined relationships. Tools like Turborepo, Nx, and Yarn Workspaces optimise monorepo workflows with smart caching and dependency graphing. Used by Google, Meta, and many large-scale engineering orgs.
When You'll Hear This
"We moved to a monorepo so the frontend and backend can share types." / "Monorepo CI pipelines only rebuild affected packages."
Related Terms
Codebase
The codebase is the whole collection of source code that makes up a project — every file, folder, and line of code.
Dependency
A dependency is a package your project relies on to work. Your app depends on React to render UI, axios to make requests, and dotenv to read config.
Package
A package is a bundle of code someone else wrote and published so you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Need to parse dates? There's a package for that.
Scaffold
Scaffolding is when a tool auto-generates the skeleton of your project for you.
Workspace
A workspace is how package managers understand a monorepo — they see multiple packages inside one repo and manage them together.