I had an extraordinarily hard time getting a monorepo set up for a proof of concept for a pretty basic dashboard app. I was using react for the frontend, node for the backend (Typescript for both), and GraphQL for the API. I tried both npm and yarn for "workspaces" but neither really made things any easier. What I wanted most of all was a repo where both frontend code and backend code were based on the same single-source-of-truth GraphQL schema, so that everything was strongly typed, avoiding any kind of API inconsistencies.
In the end, I never got things working the way I wanted. The hardest thing was getting Typescript (and worse, VScode) to recognize code across modules. The second hardest thing was getting GraphQL schema types into the frontend and backend. There's a huge ecosystem around GraphQL development, especially if you're using JS/TS, but it's still all so clunky. I ended up using a handful of tools to 1) generate the schema from the backend code, 2) serve it via introspection on the backend dev server (thank goodness for hot reloading), and 3) watch said backend schema and generate static type files for the frontend.
Did it work, sure. Is it elegant and straight forward? Definitely not. What a mess!
In the end, I never got things working the way I wanted. The hardest thing was getting Typescript (and worse, VScode) to recognize code across modules. The second hardest thing was getting GraphQL schema types into the frontend and backend. There's a huge ecosystem around GraphQL development, especially if you're using JS/TS, but it's still all so clunky. I ended up using a handful of tools to 1) generate the schema from the backend code, 2) serve it via introspection on the backend dev server (thank goodness for hot reloading), and 3) watch said backend schema and generate static type files for the frontend.
Did it work, sure. Is it elegant and straight forward? Definitely not. What a mess!