Monorepo package management workflows

Tier: Free, Premium, Ultimate Offering: GitLab.com, Self-managed, GitLab Dedicated

Use a monorepo project as a package registry to publish packages to multiple projects.

Publish packages to a project and its child projects

To publish packages to a project and its child projects, you must add configuration files for each package. To learn how to configure packages for a specific package manager, see Supported package managers.

The following example shows you how to publish packages for a project and its child project with npm.

Prerequisites:

In this example, MyProject is the parent project. It contains a child project called ChildProject in the components directory: 

MyProject/
  |- src/
  |   |- components/
  |       |- ChildProject/
  |- package.json

To publish a package for MyProject:

  1. Go to the MyProject directory.
  2. Initialize the project by running npm init. Make sure the package name follows the naming convention.

  3. Create a .npmrc file. Include the registry URL and the project endpoint. For example: 

    //gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/<project_id>/packages/npm/:_authToken="${NPM_TOKEN}"
@scope:registry=https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/<project_id>/packages/npm/

  4. Publish your package from the command line. Replace <token> with your personal access token: 

    NPM_TOKEN=<token> npm publish
caution
Never hardcode GitLab tokens (or any tokens) directly in .npmrc files or any other files that can be committed to a repository.

You should see the package for MyProject published in your project’s package registry.

To publish a package in ChildProject, follow the same steps. The contents of the .npmrc file can be identical to the one you added in MyProject.

After you publish the package for ChildProject, you should see the package in your project’s package registry.

Publishing packages to other projects

A package is associated with a project on GitLab. But, a package is not associated with the code in that project.

For example, when configuring a package for npm or Maven, the project_id sets the registry URL that the package publishes to: 

# npm
https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/<project_id>/packages/npm/

# maven
https://gitlab.example.com/api/v4/projects/<project_id>/packages/maven/

If you change the project_id in the registry URL to another project, your package publishes to that project.

By changing the project_id, you can publish multiple packages to one project separately from the code. For more information, see Store all of your packages in one GitLab project.