One repository, many projects
A monorepo holds multiple projects—often spanning several frameworks and toolchains—in a single codebase. Instead of splitting work across hundreds of repositories, teams consolidate with a monorepo to simplify package updates, make collaboration and debugging more direct, ease local development, and unlock faster builds through caching.
For a long time, monorepos were practical only at the scale of a Google or Facebook. The configuration burden and operational complexity kept smaller teams on separate repositories, accepting inconsistent dependencies and cross-repo coordination costs. Turborepo, a build system for JavaScript and TypeScript, brings the monorepo workflows of large engineering organizations to codebases of any size. It handles the complex pipeline configuration and adds incremental builds plus remote caching.
Updates that don't cascade
Shared code distributed as an npm package across many repositories is notoriously painful to update. Publishing a new version means touching each repository that depends on it, and mismatched versions inevitably drift apart. A button component can quietly render differently from page to page because each area of the application resolved a different package version.
Inside a monorepo, a package update happens in one place and propagates to every dependent workspace. There is no need to synchronize commits across repositories or hunt down which projects still run an outdated version. Consistency is enforced structurally, not by process.
Watershed software engineer Spike Brehm describes how Turborepo made this reliable for his team:
"With Turborepo, we were able to give each workspace its own build, test, and typecheck scripts and not worry about manually managing when they execute — Turbo handles the pipelining and caching. Turbo remote caching has drastically sped up our CI runs when a code change only touches one or a few workspaces."
Find, share, and reuse code
When critical components live in separate repositories, discovery is the first obstacle. Searching, sharing, and reusing code is easier when everything sits in a single location. Centralized codebases also make it simpler to enforce organizational standards in one place, rather than repeating conventions across many independent projects. For local development, the typical alternative—npm link with symlinks across dozens of repositories—scales poorly and breaks end-to-end tests. A monorepo lets a team configure testing, linting, formatting, and publishing once, keeping inactive applications from falling behind on toolchain updates.
Matt Pocock, lead developer at Stately.ai, measured the impact on continuous integration:
"Turborepo has saved us 67 hours of CI since we adopted it. That's for a team of only four full-time developers."
Caching beyond the local machine
Turborepo caches the output of previously executed commands, such as builds or tests, and replays results instantly when nothing has changed. By default that cache lives on the machine that ran the command. With remote caching, the cache is shared across the whole team and the CI environment, eliminating repeated compilation and testing of unchanged code across every developer workstation and pipeline run.
Makeswift co-founder Lindsay Trinkle emphasizes the practical payoff:
"Turborepo has drastically improved developer productivity at Makeswift, helping us get to market faster."
Turborepo is open source and can be tried through the getting-started guide. Vercel provides a hosted remote cache, which makes the shared cache available to deployments without additional infrastructure.
