Alternate Bootstrapping Methods

If you can't use your package manager's built in bootstrapping support for some reason, Lerna can handle the bootstrapping for you. There are several ways Lerna can set up your monorepo such that an app (remixapp) can find libraries in the same repo (header and footer), and one of them is to make it such that the header and footer end up in the node_modules folder of remixapp (or a different folder at the root)--that's what lerna bootstrap (without --use-workspaces) does.

Running lerna bootstrap will invoke npm install in each of the packages, and will link local package such that the resulting structure will look like this.

lerna bootstrap

packages/
    header/
        node_modules/
            react/
            ...
        src/
            ...
        package.json
        rollup.config.json
        jest.config.js

    footer/
        node_modules/
            react/
            ...
        src/
            ...
        package.json
        rollup.config.json
        jest.config.js

    remixapp/
        node_modules/
            react/
            header (symlinked to ../../header)
            footer (symlinked to ../../footer)
            ...
        app/
            ...
        public/
        package.json
        remix.config.js

package.json

Hoisting

By default, Lerna is going to run npm install in every directory which results in node modules duplication. You can dedupe the packages by passing --hoist.

lerna bootstrap --hoist

the following happens:

node_modules/
    react/
    header (symlinked to ../packages/header)
    footer (symlinked to ../packages/footer)
            ...
packages/
    header/
        src/
            ...
        package.json
        rollup.config.json
        jest.config.js

    footer/
        src/
            ...
        package.json
        rollup.config.json
        jest.config.js

    remixapp/
        app/
            ...
        public/
        package.json
        remix.config.js

package.json

Read more about hoisting in the corresponding guide.

Linking Different Folders

By default, Lerna links the contents of the folder.

node_modules/
    header/
        src/
        package.json
        rollup.config.json
        jest.config.js
            ...
packages/
    header/
        src/
            ...
        package.json
        rollup.config.json
        jest.config.js

This happens to work if you set the main property to point to the compiler artifact, like the header package does.

packages/header/package.json

{
  "name": "header",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "private": true,
  "main": "dist/index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "build": "rm -rf dist && rollup --config",
    "test": "jest"
  }
}

You can also link a subdirectory as follows using lerna bootstrap --contents=dist. The name has to apply to all the packages.