Monolithic repositories, more commonly known as monorepos, are a software development approach where code for many projects is stored in a single repository.
Monorepos provide a number of advantages such as reduced complexity, code reuse, easier collaboration amongst teams, and streamlined dependency management. Additionally, there are several drawbacks such as difficult to scale, performance concerns, requires large amounts of storage, and loss of per-service semantic versioning.
We want to improve the monorepo experience - whether it has multiple services that all get deployed together, or if it's a mobile app in a single repo that needs to be built completely differently for iOS and Android.
The primary stages that will be supporting our development of a better monorepo experience are:
Secondary stages contributing to the betterment of monorepos in GitLab are:
GitLab already has a number of important features that help monorepos:
The primary way for us to improve the monorepo experience is by focusing on scale & performance.
Bundle URIs is a Git feature whereby a
clone or fetch can be served through an http link to a bundle. This has the
distinct advantage of saving the server from having to spin up a
git-pack-objects process to pack up the objects into a packfile to then send
over the wire.
Currently in Git references are represented on disk as either separate files per reference, or a packed-refs file that contains multiple references. This implementation can be problematic in repositories with a huge number of references. A new implementation of references in Git where a binary data structure is used instead can greatly improve performance of both reading and writing references.
This was proposed and worked on on the Git mailing list, but it hasn't yet been upstreamed into the Git project. The Gitaly team will be doing the work to upstream this feature into Git itself. This can have a vast improve performance in monorepos.
GitHub has released a Remote Repository Plug-in to better meet the developer needs around monorepo experiences. This extension enables users to quickly commit to GitHub directly from Visual Studio. This empowers users to easily navigate some of the git complexities that come with monorepos.
GitHub and Perforce recently announced a strategic partnership to combat the limitations of Git when it comes to developing on large mono repositories. Perforce authored a set of GitHub Actions that allow the user to spin up a Perforce Helix Core server when working on repositories that would otherwise not be performant in GitHub alone.
