.gitignore and monorepo node projects

2020-06-21

~2 min read

341 words

Recently I was working on a project structured as a mono repo - smaller projects within a larger maintained their own dependencies.

project-structure/

$ tree -d -I \node_modules\* -L 2
.
└── project-1
│   ├── node_modules
│   ├── ...
│   └── index.js
└── project-2
│   ├── node_modules
│   ├── ...
│   └── index.js
├── .gitignore
├── ...
└── yarn.lock

I wanted to be able to ignore all of the node_modules directories without having to maintain multiple .gitignore files.

The solution was surprisingly simple:

.gitignore

node_modules/

In the future, however, I may be better served by adopting the community’s choice for what should and shouldn’t be tracked by git. Github, the company, maintains a repository for many common language / framework specific .gitignore files. Here is the recommendation for node projects:

.gitignore

# Logs
logs
*.log
npm-debug.log*
yarn-debug.log*
yarn-error.log*
lerna-debug.log*

# Diagnostic reports (https://nodejs.org/api/report.html)
report.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.[0-9]*.json

# Runtime data
pids
*.pid
*.seed
*.pid.lock

# Directory for instrumented libs generated by jscoverage/JSCover
lib-cov

# Coverage directory used by tools like istanbul
coverage
*.lcov

# nyc test coverage
.nyc_output

# Grunt intermediate storage (https://gruntjs.com/creating-plugins#storing-task-files)
.grunt

# Bower dependency directory (https://bower.io/)
bower_components

# node-waf configuration
.lock-wscript

# Compiled binary addons (https://nodejs.org/api/addons.html)
build/Release

# Dependency directories
node_modules/
jspm_packages/

# Snowpack dependency directory (https://snowpack.dev/)
web_modules/

# TypeScript cache
*.tsbuildinfo

# Optional npm cache directory
.npm

# Optional eslint cache
.eslintcache

# Microbundle cache
.rpt2_cache/
.rts2_cache_cjs/
.rts2_cache_es/
.rts2_cache_umd/

# Optional REPL history
.node_repl_history

# Output of 'npm pack'
*.tgz

# Yarn Integrity file
.yarn-integrity

# dotenv environment variables file
.env
.env.test

# parcel-bundler cache (https://parceljs.org/)
.cache
.parcel-cache

# Next.js build output
.next
out

# Nuxt.js build / generate output
.nuxt
dist

# Gatsby files
.cache/
# Comment in the public line in if your project uses Gatsby and not Next.js
# https://nextjs.org/blog/next-9-1#public-directory-support
# public

# vuepress build output
.vuepress/dist

# Serverless directories
.serverless/

# FuseBox cache
.fusebox/

# DynamoDB Local files
.dynamodb/

# TernJS port file
.tern-port

# Stores VS Code versions used for testing VS Code extensions
.vscode-test

# yarn v2
.yarn/cache
.yarn/unplugged
.yarn/build-state.yml
.pnp.*

Hi there and thanks for reading! My name's Stephen. I live in Chicago with my wife, Kate, and dog, Finn. Want more? See about and get in touch!