This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Mike Chen
Collaborating on shared components across repositories using your Git platform and Bit webhooks
As modern software development shifts towards distributed architectures, the debate between monorepos and polyrepos has grown more nuanced. Monorepos foster consistency and ease of dependency management, while polyrepos enable team autonomy and modularity. Developers often face a dilemma when choosing between the two.
Monorepo or Polyrepo?
Polyrepo architectures provide flexibility by decoupling repositories and enabling teams to work independently. However, this approach brings challenges such as duplicated code, inconsistent development standards, and difficulties managing cross-team collaboration.
Monorepos resolve some of these challenges but come with trade-offs, such as complex tooling and scalability issues for large teams.
The good news is that this monorepo — polyrepo dilemma has become obsolete, or at least drastically changed, since the introduction of Bit. Bit components do not require a git repository. They can be maintained and versioned independently. Their source of truth, the component instance that is collaborated on, is hosted on a Bit platform rather than a git host platform like Github or Gitlab.
Bit with Git for Composable Codebases
While Bit components don’t require a Git repository, some developers prefer using Git as their version control system. In such cases, Bit is essentially used as a monorepo tool. Components are versioned and collaborated using Git, while Bit handles component dependencies, efficient builds, and package publishing.
Deciding whether the source of truth for the component code resides in the Git platform (e.g., GitHub) or the Bit Platform is a choice the team must make.
Opting for the latter option inherently provides finer granularity of access control, as it is decoupled from the repository used to maintain them. In Bit Platform, components are hosted in separate access-controlled scopes aligned with team divisions.
Consuming components across repositories
Installing Bit components as standard Node packages
Bit components are published to the Bit Platform and can be accessed as standard Node packages from the Bit Platform’s registry or any registry you choose. This makes consuming Bit components across projects simple— install them like any other package.
Enforcing a ‘single version policy’ using webhooks
Monorepos are often used to implement a ‘single version policy.’ This approach enforces a uniform version of dependencies across all projects within the monorepo.
The most significant advantage of the ‘single version policy’ is the consistency it brings to the entire codebase. Ensuring that all projects use the same version of a dependency eliminates the compatibility issues that can arise when different versions are used. This uniformity makes it easier to share code between projects and reduces the likelihood of runtime bugs that are difficult to trace.
To address that need, Bit platform has recently introduced webhooks that can be used to trigger your project’s CI based on critical events such as a component release.
Using Bit Platform’s webhooks, new component releases originating from other repositories are immediately reflected across the consuming repositories, giving you a dev experience that combines the best of both worlds: monorepo and polyrepo.
Collaborating on components across repositories
As previously mentioned, unlike traditional monorepo solutions that treat the repository as the single source of truth while publishing packages from it, Bit enables components to move freely between repositories because their source of truth resides on the Bit Platform (depending on your setup). This means that components are not only installable across repositories but also maintainable across them.
With this approach, the source files of components — rather than just their packages — exist in multiple repositories.
So, how do you ensure the source files stay in sync across repositories?
That’s where Bit Platform’s webhooks come in. These webhooks can automatically trigger the necessary processes: running bit import to fetch the latest component versions and bit checkout latest to update the working directory to the most recent version.
Managing Multiple Repositories as a Single Virtual Monorepo with Bit was originally published in Bits and Pieces on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Mike Chen
Mike Chen | Sciencx (2025-01-22T23:05:36+00:00) Managing Multiple Repositories as a Single Virtual Monorepo with Bit. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/01/22/managing-multiple-repositories-as-a-single-virtual-monorepo-with-bit/
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