How to move to monorepo — A Webpack CLI story

Webpack-cli is a mandatory dependency library for webpack 4.

Webpack-cli is a command line interface that encapsulates all webpack’s CLI related code. Supporting Webpack is not an easy job with its various options and varieties. This made webpack-cli a huge repo.

At the core it has init and migrate commands.

• The former is for creating or adding a new entity into Webpack build.
• The latter is for migrating between various versions.

Added to that, there were other functionalities like generating loaders, plugins etc.,

With so many options, the webpack-cli is more complicated. It had a lot of intertwined and cyclic dependencies. It made maintaining and enhancing webpack-cli a nightmare.

This made it difficult for users to understand, contribute or(and) use them.

This should be an ideal situation for most of the projects. Started as a small helper library but ended up being a huge repo.

The key for any open source projects to thrive are,

1. Easy to use / understand projects

2. Increasing contributors

3. Evolving code base

To make the above possible. In the team meeting, I raised an issue to simplify the codebase by splitting them into individual…