turborepo_skill

Overview

This skill guides implementing Turborepo, a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos. It focuses on workspace layout, pipeline configuration, caching strategies (local and remote), and practical commands to orchestrate tasks across packages. The goal is faster builds, repeatable CI, and predictable incremental workflows.

How this skill works

Turborepo builds a task graph from package scripts and pipeline rules in turbo.json, then executes tasks in topological order with parallelism for independent work. It detects inputs and outputs, uses content-based hashing to cache task results locally or remotely, and restores cache hits instantly to skip redundant work. Filters and dependency patterns let you target specific packages or changed files to minimize work.

When to use it

• Creating or converting a repository to a monorepo with multiple packages or apps
• Speeding up local development and CI by avoiding redundant builds
• Defining cross-package task pipelines (build → test → lint) with dependency awareness
• Sharing build artifacts across team and CI via remote cache
• Pruning monorepo contents for Docker or focused deployments

Best practices

• Declare outputs for each pipeline task (dist/, .next/, etc.) so cache can be restored reliably
• Use remote caching for CI and team environments to maximize cache reuse
• Disable cache for persistent dev servers (cache: false, persistent: true)
• Control inputs and env in turbo.json to avoid accidental cache invalidation
• Filter runs to affected packages (filter patterns or Git-based filters) to save compute

Example use cases

• Run turbo run build across all workspaces with concurrency to parallelize independent packages
• Configure turbo.json so build dependsOn ^build to compile dependencies first
• Link to Vercel remote cache (turbo login && turbo link) to speed up CI pipelines
• Use turbo prune --scope=web --docker to create a minimal build context for Docker images
• Run turbo run test --filter='...[origin/main]' to only test changed packages