chore: switch to npm workspaces

[ojeytonwilliams]

• I have read Chapter's contributing guidelines.
• My pull request has a descriptive title (not a vague title like Update README.md).
• My pull request targets the main branch of Chapter.

This isn't a huge deal, since we only have three packages, but workspaces are quite nice. They cut down on duplication and, as a result, speed up installation. Plus, we don't need our own code for installing all the packages.

[gitpod-io]

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[ojeytonwilliams]

@gikf @Ravichandra-C does this all make sense? You'll be the most directly impacted in the immediate future, so if some of this seems silly let me know!

[gikf]

@ojeytonwilliams I couldn't say, I'm not too familiar with how this should be configured.

[ojeytonwilliams]

Not to worry, @gikf

Not much should change, honestly. The only real quirk I ran into is that prisma doesn't automatically prisma generate if you use workspaces, so I had to do that manually.

Anyways, it's not urgent, so I'll give Ravi a chance to see it before I merge.

[Ravichandra-C]

@ojeytonwilliams , I'm also not very familiar with this.

[ojeytonwilliams]

Okay, the idea goes like this. Rather than having three packages, (root, client and server) all with independent package-locks, we treat the client and server as workspaces and have a single package-lock that governs all three.

This dramatically cuts down on package duplication and, because npm understands workspaces, we no longer need to handle their installation. i.e. we don't need to use npx recursive-install, lerna or (as we currently do) have our own code for installing the client and server. Instead, running npm i does it all.

In practical terms, you have to use npm i -w=client new-package if you want to install a new package in the client (and -w=server for the server, naturally). You'll know that something went wrong if a new package-lock appears in a PR.

[allella]

@ojeytonwilliams does this npm workspaces change anything about our dependencies or minimum versions of node or npm?

Is all that changes is some of the npm i commands?

[ojeytonwilliams]

@ojeytonwilliams does this npm workspaces change anything about our dependencies or minimum versions of node or
npm?

No, they're unchanged. Workspaces need npm 7, but we've required 8 for a while now.

Is all that changes is some of the npm i commands?

Pretty much. Anything you'd have previously done via cd package && npm... you'll need to do via npm -w=package.

[allella]

It sounds to me like we can update the docs and go with workspaces if it's not going to confuse or bother the casual contributor.

[ojeytonwilliams]

@allella I think so. I've add a little to the docs in this PR, but I'm going to merge as soon as the CI passes. Just because otherwise renovate might merge something and rebasing is a nuisance.