Skip to main content

Scaling Projects with Nx Monorepo Architecture

· 2 min read
Thinh Le
Thinh Le
Digital Product Developer

Managing multiple, interconnected applications in separate repositories quickly becomes a nightmare of version mismatches, duplicated configuration, and painful dependency updates. Nx Monorepo solves this elegantly by bringing all your apps and shared libraries under a single, intelligently managed roof.

Team working on architecture

The Problem with Polyrepos​

Before adopting a monorepo strategy, my projects were scattered across individual repositories. The workflow looked something like this:

  1. Update a shared utility in utils-repo.
  2. Publish a new version to npm.
  3. Update the version in 3 different apps.
  4. Pray nothing breaks.

This only worked until the moment it didn't. Missing a version bump in a critical app led to subtle bugs that were maddening to trace.

Why Nx?​

Nx is more than just a monorepo tool. It's a build system with a graph-based understanding of your project that enables:

  • Affected builds and tests: nx affected --target=build only rebuilds what changed — a massive time saver in CI/CD.
  • Computation Caching: Results are cached locally (and remotely with Nx Cloud) so you never run the same task twice.
  • Dependency Graph: Visualize your entire project graph with nx graph.
  • Code Generation: Powerful generators to scaffold new apps, libraries, and configurations consistently.

This Portfolio's Nx Setup​

This portfolio lives in a monorepo with three distinct applications:

apps/
  website/    → Docusaurus frontend (Cloudflare Pages)
  core-api/   → Hono.js API (Cloudflare Workers)
  search-engine/ → Search service (Cloudflare Workers)
apps/
  content-hub/ → Blog markdown content (Git submodule)

Each app is independently deployable but shares a common development environment, .dev.vars secrets, and TypeScript configuration. wrangler's local service bindings connect them together seamlessly during development.

The Developer Experience Win​

The biggest win is the unified developer experience. One bun install at the root, a handful of bun run dev commands in parallel, and the entire stack is running locally. No context-switching between repositories.

If you're managing more than two related applications, a monorepo — and Nx in particular — is worth the initial setup investment.