My Experience with TurboRepo & Monorepos: From Chaos to Sanity

A Dev Setup That Started Like Everyone Else’s

If you’ve ever worked on a full-stack project, chances are your folder structure looked like this:

/client  
/server  
/README.md (you never updated)

And at first—it’s fine. Until one day, I was debugging something and realize that I am just copy-pasting the same utility function between folders and breaking the DRY rule.

Then the installs break. Then the dependency trees spiral. Then I am 10 commits deep into fixing a node_modules issue and forget what the feature even was.

Welcome to my life… until I discovered Monorepos.

Wait, What Even Is a Monorepo?

So, I had heard the term floating around in dev Twitter and Reddit threads, but I never really got it. I thought it was just one of those "enterprise-only" things Google does.

but it turend out—it’s just keeping all your packages, apps, and services in one codebase, organized and connected like a family that actually talks to each other.

You can share code. You can isolate builds. You can run tests on specific packages. And yeah, Google does it. That was enough to get me curious.

Enter: TurboRepo

I stumbled across TurboRepo, and the first thing I thought was:

“Wait, why didn’t anyone tell me about this sooner?”

It’s a high-performance build system for monorepos—designed to make your life less painful when managing multiple apps and packages in a single repo. And the cool part? It's designed for JS/TS devs like us.

No 20-step YAML configs. Just set up your pipeline, link things with workspaces, and boom—stuff starts working.

The Switch: Folder Chaos to Turbo Calm

I had an ongoing project with the usual split: one folder for the frontend (React), another for the backend (Express).

Converting that into a Turbo monorepo setup only took me an hour or two. (And that too with Express, which has like zero real monorepo resources out there—someone fix this please. (Article soon :)))

Now it looks more like:

/apps  
  /web  
  /api  
/packages  
  /ui  
  /utils  
  /config

And suddenly, my build scripts aren’t yelling at me. My eslint config is shared. And I'm not doing npm install in two places like an absolute fool.

The Real Benefits I Felt

Let’s be real, here’s what actually changed for me:

• One place for all code: No more syncing packages manually or debugging two node_modules folders.
• Code sharing became easy: Utils, types, and configs now live in one packages/ folder and are shared across both frontend and backend.
• Less context switching: I don't need to cd into three places just to start the dev server.
• My disaster folder got fixed: I once broke a project so badly because I didn’t understand workspaces properly. Turbo fixed that mess, cleaned up the structure, and gave me a fresh start.
• Ease to Scale: Now it would be easier to add more things like admin or something like that.

Not All Rainbows

Turbo is powerful, but it’s also a bit opinionated. Some things still need digging around, especially if you’re working outside the Next.js happy path.

But once you get it running—it’s worth it.

(Also, don’t forget to cache smartly. Turbo's speed magic depends on it.)

Conclusion

So yeah—monorepos are not just for big corps. If you're building multi-package apps, it makes total sense even for solo devs or small teams. And TurboRepo? Chef's kiss. 🤌

I’m still experimenting and learning, especially with backend-heavy setups (looking at you, Express). But so far, I’d say this is one of the cleanest architectural decisions I’ve made in months.

If you’re stuck in the client-server folder spiral—maybe it’s time to go mono.