Node.js multi package project?

Question

I'm new to Node, coming from a Java background. These days I'm experimenting with each part of a full application: database, rest api, ui.

So far I wrote the database-backed logic, which runs on its own, processes text files, store data about them in the database and exposes a REST API to query that data. I'm now going to make the ui to navigate that data.

Would it be reasonable having a structure like this:

- (a) main project folder
    - (b) backend application (a Restify server responds to REST calls querying the database)
    - (c) ui application (an http server serves React static files)

If that makes sense, I would guess that:

• (b) has a package.json with server- and rest- related dependencies (i.e. Restify, MongoDB, ...)
• (c) has another package.json with dependencies for ui (i.e. React, Webpack, etc, but not Restify or MongoDB)
• (a) has a third package.json which cares for installing each sub-project (I'd say by running npm install through hand-written npm-scripts). Otherwise, how do you usually handle such Node projects? Do you keep each application completely separate from the rest?

For those who know that tool, this mimics a Maven multi-module project; though that level of automation is not needed, I'd just like to come up with a self-contained package.

Hierophant

Thanks @Hierophant for this excellent question! Can you share your end result? – Periostitis

@Periostitis As usually happens with commercial projects, I've soon been set on another one, so I hadn't had a chance to try anything :-) But I'll report here as soon as I can find something. – Hierophant

@Periostitis I started a new project where I'm extracting parts of an existing monolithic application into separate packages (ui components, icons, etc), as subfolders beside the main application folder; Lerna helps use them as local dependencies (though it may feel a bit strange at times, i.e. you can only add one dependency at a time, there's no uninstall command, but npm uninstall breaks because local dependencies are declared as regular ones); there's no support though for application packaging / deploying AFAICT - and it is said in several issues that Lerna is not a deployment tool. – Hierophant

Answer 1

These project structures are called as monorepos - A single node project repository that contains multiple packages. There are tools like Lerna. If you are using yarn as package manager, it comes with experimental feature of workspaces.

Bellew

Thank you. I'm currently using webpack, but I'll have a look at both. – Hierophant

Back after some Lerna experience. You may find my impressions in my comment to my own question. It seems Lerna only covers half of my requirements, offering no packaging / deployments facilities; but then even a tool like Gulp (for what I've seen) doesn't provide any kind of project structure / lifecycle (a la Maven so to speak), in fact I ended up writing my own copy-this-zip-that-upload-those-there script. – Hierophant