lerna monorepo for storybook

Yulia Chive

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08-12-2024

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Lerna Monorepos: Supercharging Your Storybook Workflow

Storybook is a fantastic tool for developing UI components in isolation, but managing multiple Storybooks across a large project can become cumbersome. This is where Lerna, a popular monorepo manager, shines. By organizing your Storybook configurations within a Lerna monorepo, you can streamline your development process, improve code sharing, and enhance maintainability. This article explores the benefits and best practices for using Lerna to manage your Storybook setups.

Why Lerna and Storybook? A Powerful Combination

Many modern JavaScript projects adopt a monorepo architecture, housing multiple packages within a single repository. Lerna simplifies the management of such projects, offering features like:

• Simplified Dependency Management: Easily manage shared components and utilities across different Storybook instances. Changes in a shared component automatically propagate to all dependent Storybooks.
• Atomic Component Updates: Update and test individual components without affecting the entire application. This granular approach speeds up development and reduces the risk of introducing breaking changes.
• Consistent Development Environment: Maintain a unified development environment for all your Storybooks, ensuring consistency across projects.
• Improved Code Reusability: Share Storybook configurations and addons easily between packages.
• Efficient CI/CD: Lerna simplifies the process of building and deploying multiple Storybooks as part of your CI/CD pipeline.

Setting Up a Lerna Monorepo for Storybook

Let's walk through setting up a basic Lerna monorepo with two Storybook instances: ui-components and my-app.

1. Project Initialization:

npm init -y
npm install --save-dev lerna

2. Initialize Lerna:

npx lerna init --independent

This creates the lerna.json file and sets up the monorepo structure. The --independent flag allows each package to have its own version number.

3. Create Packages:

Create two directories: packages/ui-components and packages/my-app. In each, run:

npm init -y
npm install --save-dev @storybook/react @storybook/addon-actions @storybook/addon-links # Or your preferred framework

4. Configure Storybook:

In each package's directory (packages/ui-components and packages/my-app), create a storybook directory and add the necessary Storybook configuration files (.storybook/main.js, etc.). Ensure that the main.js file correctly points to your component directories. For example, in packages/ui-components/.storybook/main.js:

module.exports = {
  stories: ['../src/**/*.stories.jsx'],
  addons: ['@storybook/addon-actions', '@storybook/addon-links'],
};

5. Add Shared Components (Optional):

If you want to share components between your Storybook instances, place them in a shared package (e.g., packages/shared-components).

6. Running Storybook:

You can run Storybook for each package individually:

# For ui-components
cd packages/ui-components
npm run storybook

# For my-app
cd packages/my-app
npm run storybook

7. Leveraging Lerna Commands:

Lerna provides helpful commands to manage your packages:

• lerna bootstrap: Installs dependencies for all packages.
• lerna run storybook: Runs storybook in all packages concurrently. This is incredibly useful for development.
• lerna publish: Publishes updated packages.

Advanced Techniques

• Shared Addons: Create a shared package containing custom Storybook addons for consistency across projects.
• Automated Testing: Integrate Storybook testing into your CI/CD pipeline using Lerna.
• Mono-repo specific Storybook configurations: Tailor your main.js files to leverage the monorepo structure. For instance, use Lerna's path resolution to locate shared components.

Conclusion

Integrating Lerna into your Storybook workflow provides a significant boost in efficiency and maintainability, especially for larger projects. By streamlining dependency management, fostering code reuse, and simplifying the build process, Lerna transforms Storybook from a useful tool into a powerful engine for UI development in complex projects. Embrace the power of monorepos and elevate your Storybook experience.