I have a multirepo project. It has an “app” repository that has multiple dependencies. These other dependencies have dependencies themselves.

I would like to migrate from a multirepo to a monorepo setup and I saw that yarn workspaces offer the architecture I would like to achieve (a real world example that I found is the jest repository which defines workspaces in its package.json file)

The specific problem I encounter is that I haven’t found a way to perform an incremental migration to workspaces.

e.g

// app repository package.json

  "workspaces": [
  "packages/*"
  ],
 "dependencies":{
  dependency-a: "workspace:packages/dependency-a"
  dependency-b: 1.2.3

  // ...other dependencies
}

Under the packages folder I have migrated dependency-a. Ideally, I want to see that dependecy-a no longer exists in the node_modules and instead only exists under thepackages folder.

The problem is the following:

dependency-a is also an internal dependency of dependency-b and dependency-b is used in various other modules. I think I am supposed to migrate dependency-b to a workspace as well, but since other modules link to it, it will continue to exist as a node module inside app until I have migrated everything (that is: dependency-b and all the modules that also list it).

Of course this creates a chain reaction. If migrating a module to a workspace means I also have to migrate its internal modules (that I wrote) to workspaces, there is no way to achieve an incremental migration, my only option is to migrate everything at once.

Am I understanding it correctly? Is there a resource / guide I can follow?