@lerna-lite/init

(lerna init) - Init command 🛠️

Create/initialize a new Lerna-Lite repo or upgrade an existing repo to the current version of Lerna-Lite CLI

Installation

npm install @lerna-lite/cli -D

# then use it (see usage below)
lerna init

Usage

$ lerna init

Create/initialize a new Lerna-Lite repo or upgrade an existing repo to the current version of Lerna-Lite.

Lerna assumes the repo has already been initialized with git init.

When run, this command will:

1. Add lerna as a devDependency in package.json if it doesn't already exist.
2. Creates lerna.json config file to store the version number and also add a packages property (unless you provide --use-workspaces)
   • for more info and full details about the lerna.json file, you can read the lerna.json Wiki.

Example output on a new git repo:

$ lerna init
lerna info version v1.3.0
lerna info Updating package.json
lerna info Creating lerna.json
lerna success Initialized Lerna files

lerna.json

{
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "packages": ["packages/*"]
}

Note that the packages is only useful for optional commands like exec, list or run. However, if you only care about the publish and version and run other commands via your package manager (like pnpm for example) or other tools, then you probably don't even need the packages property.

If you are using a different client other than npm, then make sure to update the npmClient (acceptable options are npm, yarn, pnpm) property in lerna.json (for example: "npmClient": "yarn"). This property must be updated manually since there are no flag available for the init command.

Options

--independent

$ lerna init --independent

This flag tells Lerna-Lite to use independent versioning mode.

--exact

$ lerna init --exact

By default, lerna init will use a caret range when adding or updating the local version of lerna, just like npm install --save-dev lerna.

To retain the lerna of "exact" comparison, pass this flag. It will configure lerna.json to enforce exact match for all subsequent executions.

{
  "command": {
    "init": {
      "exact": true
    }
  },
  "version": "0.0.0"
}

--use-workspaces

$ lerna init --use-workspaces

This flag tells Lerna-Lite to add a workspaces property in your project root package.json file instead of the default packages from lerna.json file, this is the recommended workspace setup used by Yarn/NPM Workspaces (however not recommended for pnpm).

In summary, this flag is only useful for npm or yarn users which expect a workspaces property in their package.json. For pnpm users, this will not work neither do anything (for pnpm users, look at the default setting of having packages in lerna.json file (as shown in default usage lerna.json config)).

lerna.json

{
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "useWorkspaces": true
}

package.json (at the project root)

{
  "name": "monorepo",
  "devDependencies": {
    "@lerna-lite/cli": "^1.0.0"
  },
  "workspaces": ["packages/*"]
}