pnezis
Workspace - A set of tools for working with Elixir monorepos
We are open sourcing workspace a set of tools for working with elixir monorepos, inspired by rust workspaces and nx.dev. Twitter announcement
You can find the docs here.
There are many reasons for having a monorepo but working with them may be cumbersome. Workspace provides a set of tools for working with big monorepos efficiently.
What is a workspace?
A workspace is nothing more than a git repository hosting multiple mix projects in any arbitrary folder structure. Path dependencies are used for cross project dependencies similarly to umbrellas.
The central concept of the workspace is the workspace graph. This is a directed acyclic graph where the nodes represent projects and the edges the dependencies between projects.
Workspace uses git to get the changes between two revisions. Knowing which files have changed we can deduce which project is modified or affected:
Running tasks
You can run any command from the root on all or a subset of the workspace projects. You can also run time consuming tasks only on the affected projects significantly improving CI times for large codebases.
Checking your workspace
When your workspace grows, it can go out of hand quickly. You need a way to check that your projects are properly defined. With the workspace.check task you can among other:
- Ensure that specific dependencies are set on all projects, e.g.
ex_doc. - Ensure that external dependencies versions match the expected ones.
- Verify that no forbidden dependencies are defined.
- Ensure that all projects have common build paths
Enforcing boundaries
One of the main purposes of monorepos is to help you split your codebase into independent, cohesive and reusable packages. You can enforce a clean architecture by tagging your projects and enforcing boundaries between them.
Creating a workspace
You can create a new workspace with the workspace.new scaffolder:
mix archive.install hex workspace_new
mix workspace.new your_workspace
Helper packages
The workspace repo is itself a workspace and comes with two extra small packages.
cli_options- provides an opinionated way to parse CLI options based on a schema similarly toNimbleOptionscascade- is a small library for generating code for templates.
Disclaimer
Despite being stable (we successfully use it internally to manage a massive elixir codebase consisting of hundreds of packages) this is still a 0.x.x project and breaking changes may happen.
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davydog187
This is a really exciting start!
We’ve recently moved to GitHub - casey/just: 🤖 Just a command runner after we gave up on running various tasks through Mix. We will definitely give this a try and report back
pnezis
@mindreframer This is a sample workspace project with some boundaries rules enabled 
(all projects are mix hello world projects)
pnezis
You are right, I have noticed it as well but forgot to mention it in the docs. What I do as a workaround is to run mix phx.new outside of apps and then just mv it in it.
The phx.new task is only looking if there is a parent apps folder and if it exists it is treated as an umbrella project. Maybe a --no-umbrella option option would help.
mindreframer
Awesome! I didn’t notice, that workspace itself uses workspace, that’s cool! Yep, I guess I will have some fun time study-ing the codebase.
Thanks a lot!
cmo
Do it once, commit the json config to your source control and you’re done. Not sure how much simpler we can get than native IDE support? You could write a script to generate the workspace config file if you want.
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