Fan Girl

Meet Fangirl. A multi-repo code management tool.

Fangirl is similar to Lerna and Yarn Workspaces but designed to work in a non monorepo structure.

Our codebase for Amna is split across mutliple repos. Some of those repos are open-source as well, meaning we can't move to a large monorepo. This means that we were constantly working across multiple repos, tied with npm link.

Fangirl does three (possibly more) things to make working across multiple repos easier :

• links local dependencies
• runs scripts in any repo
• abstracts over git to make cross-library feature changes

Fangirl is not designed for CI workflows, it's mainly about developer experience, and making it fast to manage working with multiple repos.

Getting Started

To get started, create a folder with a package.json and add a repos attribute. Or add it in one of your existing packages.

We added it in the package.json of our client-ui because that's often where features begin.

// in any package.json add your repos
{
  "repos": [
    "../lo-graph",
    "../lo-graph-sync",
    "../amna-desktop",
    "../amna-browser",
    "../amna-common"
  ]
}

Note, the paths in the repos attribute do not necessarily have to be git repos, they are really just the directories that contain packages, and can even be subdirectories in a larger repo.

npm install -g fangirl

To verify fangirl works, run this in the directory with the package.json:

fangirl list

Here is the onboarding repo we use with our new developers and our fangirl scripts.

Setting Up

A few commands exist to help with setting up an environment:

| command | description | | ----------------- | -------------------------------------------- | | fangirl install | runs an npm install in all listed packages | | fangirl link | links any dependent libraries together | | fangirl unlink | unlinks all the dependent libraries |

Feature Changes

A few commands exist to help with creating repo cutting feature changes

| command | description | | --------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | fangirl branch | will tell you what branch you're on in each repo| | fangirl checkout <branch> | will create or checkout a git branch in all of the requested repos | | fangirl drop | if uncommited changes exist, will drop all the changes across all of the repos | | fangirl update | upgrades to new package version and updates the package.json of all dependents |

• Use the -p or --packages flag to scope these commands to only to specific packages
• Use the -m or --convertMaster flag to get the main branch even if master was requested

Run Scripts

A few commands exist to help with running commands in specific repos

| command | description | | -------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------- | | fangirl run <scriptName> | will run an npm run <scriptName> in all of the repos you ask |

• Use the -p or --packages flag to scope thes commands to only to specific packages
• Use the --parallel flag to run all of the commands at once. Think npm run watch in all of your repos

Testing Locally

After cloning this repo:

npm install
tsc -w
node dist/cli.js {args here}

Feel free to open an issue, or contribute any changes. Could use some tests!