Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gen220 | Hacker News Reader

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We (~150 eng) build microservices in a polyglot environment (mostly Python, JS, and Go), all in a monorepo! We also build + deploy in containers with Jenkins, etc.

The structure looks something like this:

    |-- third_party (third party libs)
    `-- python
        |-- libs (internally-written, common dependencies)
        `-- application_name
            |-- client (react app, connects to flask)
            |-- server (flask app, connects to services)
            `-- services (microservices)

We use a dependency-management + build tool (https://www.pantsbuild.org/index.html, we started before Bazel was public) to manage dependencies. Without pants, our repo would be a mess.

Let me know if you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them! I'm super happy about our setup and eager to share it :)

> Without pants, our repo would be a mess.

Filed under sentences I never thought I'd hear.

Hahaha, because pants is a bad tool? Or because it sounds funny? I’m sympathetic to both :)

In defense of pants, I meant that our repo would be a mess without a versioned dependency graph + reproducible builds. Of course other tools give you that too, and definitely do it better than pants does.

I guess I should have said “without some build tool”, our repo would be a mess.

Organising apps by language seems weird...

I've seen this and it works rather well in that one can have per-language bottom level build setup (with autoconf for C, setuptools for Python, ...).

I agree with the GP that it seems weird, and with you that it has its benefits. Of course, other approaches have their own benefits.

Personally, I feel like the top-level directory ordering for a monorepo is somewhat arbitrary, in that you can argue for anything, but it probably doesn’t matter; especially if you have a decent build tool.

Hierarchical layout demands choices be made, but there are advantages in grouping source packages by language: 1) can naturally reflect object packaging models of target language (eg python, jvm). 2) this can encourage reuse of packages across projects.

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