Navigating Monorepos with Ease

A few years back now I wrote a short blog post sharing a shell function that made it easier to navigate Yarn v1 monorepos. I realized today that I haven't updated that post with a new function that works for Yarn berry (v2 and v3) releases.

Similar to that original snippet (which I've since re-named to ywOld) you'll need to install fzf and jq via homebrew (brew), but once you've done that you should be able to quickly run any script from any package without typing out the whole workspace name or without changing into the directory for the workspace.

yw() {
  yarn workspace $(yarn --json workspaces list | jq '.' -r | jq ".name" -r | fzf) "$@"
}

yw() {
  yarn workspace $(yarn --json workspaces list | jq '.' -r | jq ".name" -r | fzf) "$@"
}

To "install" this, you can copy and paste the above snippet into your .bashrc or .zshrc file (or whatever config file you use for your shell), and then source that config (e.g. source ~/.zshrc) in your terminal and you should be able to use it!

Example usage:

# You can use it to run any package.json script within the workspace of
# your choice via:
yw <script-name>
# For example, if you want to run the `test` script on a specific
# workspace, you can run:
yw test
# passing args should "just work":
yw test some-file-name

# You can use it to run any package.json script within the workspace of
# your choice via:
yw <script-name>
# For example, if you want to run the `test` script on a specific
# workspace, you can run:
yw test
# passing args should "just work":
yw test some-file-name

Notably, this doesn't let you select multiple workspaces to run a command within, I may eventually package this up into a helpful package that you can install directly in your monorepo, akin to one of my older projects Zaps 🤔.

Also - if you still have some projects using yarn classic, I ended up renaming my old yw script to ywold 😂.