Working with Lerna to manage monorepos

Lerna is one of the oldest tools for managing monorepos. We can even say to some degree that Lerna not only made monorepos manageable but also popular. Lerna is the backbone of some of the most important monorepos, such as Jest. It also was the original choice for projects such as Babel or React.

Originally, Lerna was mainly picked because it correctly installed and resolved all the packages. At this time, no package manager was capable of doing that intrinsically. However, today, Lerna is most often used together with the workspace features offered by the different package managers. Of course, you can still use the original mode of Lerna, where plain npm is used to install and link the different packages. So, how does Lerna fit into this new role when the whole installation is done by the chosen package manager anyway?

It turns out that Lerna is a really great task-running layer on top of a package manager. For instance, running a package...