Building production-ready artifacts from pnpm monorepo

[lukeromanowicz]

Hey,
when I am working on my local machine all the symlinks produced by pnpm for dependencies in every workspace package are simply amazing. A lot of time and storage space is saved. Unfortunately, almost every package in production environment needs to be built and served separately as a standalone container image. I would prefer to avoid adding all dependencies and the code of all the packages to every single artifact built per package in the workspace. Unfortunately, no matter what settings I am using, there are always some packages either missing or symbolically linked to directories outside the given package. Can somebody, please, guide me on how to build standalone production artifacts on a per package basis?

my monorepo has the following structure:

.
└── packages
    ├── service1
    ├── service2
    └── shared

Both service1 and service2 are using package 'shared' as a dependency.

I would like to install dependencies and build package shared first, then install dependencies of service1 and clone the dist folder of the shared directory into node_modules/@myorg/shared in service1 package. This way directory service1 alone could be cloned to a docker image and become a standalone app. The same goes for service2. Is this possible? If that's a bad practice, what should I research instead?

[bergmanpontus]

It sounds like this should be possible to to if you'd use a tool lite Turborepo and its Tasks. There you could define which dependency tasks another one is dependent one.
In your scenario you'd have shared as a dependency in service1 give the "^build" indicator which means that building it requires build having been run for all its dependencies. It's a pretty powerful pattern

[hilja]

I'm not 100% if this is what you're asking but have you looked at pnpm deploy? It's very neat, it'll bundle up all the needed deps (including shared deps from other workspaces) into one portable directory which you can then copy where ever is needed. Plus you can only include prod deps.

Some resources:

• https://pnpm.io/cli/deploy
• https://pnpm.io/docker#example-2-build-multiple-docker-images-in-a-monorepo
• https://pnpm.io/cli/fetch
• Best practices for using PNPM with docker monorepo #3114
• https://pnpm.io/cli/pack

pnpm deploy example with two projects foo and bar:

FROM node:lts-alpine3.19 AS base
RUN corepack enable
WORKDIR /usr/src/app
COPY pnpm-lock.yaml .
RUN pnpm fetch
COPY . .
RUN pnpm i --offline --frozen-lockfile
RUN pnpm build
RUN pnpm -F=foo --prod deploy /myapp/foo
RUN pnpm -F=bar --prod deploy /myapp/bar

# Use `foo` or `bar` as a target when deploying
FROM node:lts-alpine3.19 AS foo
COPY --from=base /myapp/foo /myapp/foo
WORKDIR /myapp/foo
CMD node build/server.js

FROM node:lts-alpine3.19 AS bar
COPY --from=base /myapp/bar /myapp/bar
WORKDIR /myapp/bar
CMD node build/server.js