Production Monorepos with Turborepo

Your team is building a developer platform. You need a marketing site, snippet manager app, and documentation portal. Managing these as separate repos is a bad time for a few reasons, and you might hear yourself screaming sentences like:

"The button design changed!" → Update in 3 places, deploy 3 times
"We need consistent ESLint rules!" → Copy configs, hope they stay in sync
"This build is taking 12 minutes!" → No caching between related changes
"Coordinating releases is the worst!" → Breaking changes cascade across repos

Monorepos solve these problems.

Let's build GeniusGarage - a code snippet management platform for developers. GeniusGarage brings your apps together while maintaining clear boundaries and leveraging Turborepo's intelligent caching for blazing-fast builds.

What you'll learn

This course covers 8 sections that progressively build GeniusGarage, an app where we can show off our code snippets like the trophies they are:

Section 1: Monorepo Fundamentals - Understand what monorepos are, when to use them, and why Turborepo
Section 2: First Shared Package - Create shared UI package with Button and Card components
Section 3: Second App - Add snippet manager app that reuses the UI package
Section 4: Shared Configs & Utils - DRY up TypeScript/ESLint configs and create utility functions
Section 5: Testing - Add Vitest tests to UI package with test caching
Section 6: Pipeline Optimization - Add GitHub Actions, filtering, and remote caching
Section 7: Scaling to Multiple Apps - Add docs app with independent deploys
Section 8: Enterprise Patterns - Add generators, changesets, code governance, and explore next-forge production patterns

Prerequisites

Node.js 20.9+ and pnpm 9+ installed
Comfortable with React and Next.js basics
Git and GitHub account
Vercel account (free tier works fine for this course)
Basic terminal experience

Coming from Next.js?

You already know component organization, build processes, and deployment. Turborepo extends these skills to managing multiple apps efficiently. You're 80% there.

How this course works

Build everything yourself: Type every line of code so you can understand how everything works
Deploy constantly: Every section ends with working production apps
Real metrics matter: Measure cache hits, build times, actual URLs
Progressive complexity: Each section adds one new capability
Production patterns only: Everything you build ships to users

Reference material

This course builds on official Turborepo patterns:

Turborepo Docs - Reference when you need deep dives
Turborepo Examples - Runnable patterns for specific features
next-forge - Vercel's production template explored in Section 8

Build From Scratch

You'll type out every package and app yourself. This ensures you understand how everything fits together. Reference implementations exist for patterns, but you'll build GeniusGarage with your own hands.

Getting started

Ready to ship? Start with Monorepo Fundamentals for conceptual foundation, or jump straight to First Shared Package to start building.