Turborepo Express and Next.js example setup

This is an example setup for a full-stack monorepo using Turborepo with Next.js and Express

Most other Turborepo examples I've seen using Express take a different approach to bundling shared packages.

Most examples like Turbo kitchen-sink example will have dev and build scripts for each shared package, which then watch the package for any changes and rebuild on each change.

I wanted to to find a way to avoid having a dev and build step for each package, and simply import the package into the app that needs it, and have the app bundle the package during it's build step.

This is very simple to do with Next.js 13 using Transpile packages

// next.config.js
const nextConfig = {
  transpilePackages: ['@example/**'],
}

module.exports = nextConfig

transpilePackages will automatically transpile and bundle local shared packages during next's build step

Doing this with Express however was not as straight-forward, but I was able to get it working with a pretty simple setup using tsup

Building an app using tsup with the following config will automatically transpile and bundle local shared packages during the build step

// tsup.config.ts

import { defineConfig } from 'tsup'

export default defineConfig({
  entry: ['./index.ts'],
  noExternal: ['@example'],
  splitting: false,
  bundle: true,
  outDir: './dist',
  clean: true,
  env: { IS_SERVER_BUILD: 'true' },
  loader: { '.json': 'copy' },
  minify: true,
  sourcemap: true,
})

The magic here is noExternal: ['@example']

This one setting allows you to bundle any external shared packages matching @example and their dependencies into the app's build output.

Example: shared packages named @example/logger and @example/utils will both be bundled into the app's build output, along with their dependencies.

Try it out yourself:

Turborepo will run these commands for all packages and apps from the root directory

Install all dependencies for all packages and apps

pnpm i

Start dev env for both server and front-end

pnpm dev

Build both server and front-end apps

pnpm build

Run both server and front-end apps

pnpm start