Workflow for Poly-Repo Management (Local Workspace vs. CI Git Dependencies)

[jersonal-com]

Hi all,

We are using melos to manage a "virtual monorepo" where our packages and apps exist in separate Git repositories but are checked out into a single directory structure for local development. I'm struggling to find a workflow that supports both local development and our CI/CD pipeline on Codemagic. 😅

The goal is to have a setup where:

Local Development: I can work across multiple local packages seamlessly using path dependencies. melos should work with bootstrap, scripts, etc.
CI/CD Pipeline: When building a single app (e.g., on Codemagic), its dependencies on other packages must be resolved from their respective Git repositories

The issue I faced is a conflict between the requirements for these two environments:

• Local melos requires a workspace: For melos bootstrap to correctly link local packages and manage the workspace, the root pubspec.yaml needs a workspace: definition, and all packages included must have resolution: workspace in their pubspec.yaml.
• CI requires standalone packages: For a CI build of a single app to succeed, its pubspec.yaml must resolve dependencies via git:. If resolution: workspace is present, pub get fails because the rest of the workspace doesn't exist.

I tried many different approaches. The one that nearly worked was to uses path: dependencies and resolution: workspace and then a pubspec_overrides.yaml for each package. This file contains resolution: (to opt-out of the workspace) and dependency_overrides: pointing to the git: repositories. Locally I can then remove the override files before running melos and restoring them afterwards.

While this would work for the top-level app quite nicely I unfortunately have also one dependency from one package to another one:

app
 -> package a
 -> package b
     ->package a

As it seems when running flutter pub get in the CI/CD the pubspec.yaml from the package b is analyzed before the pubspec_override.yaml is applied and I get an error referencing the path dependency that says Invalid description in the "package_b" pubspec on the "package_a" dependency: the path "../" cannot refer outside the git repository.

Update:

This is how I could got the 2 options running:

• The app gets all the packages with their git url as dependencies -- even if the app itself does not depend on these
• In the package b I can then specify the dependency as package_a: ^1.0.0 - which works in the local and the CI/CD environment.
• The local melos still requires the "wrapper" script to remove the pubspec_override.yaml files, then run melos and afterwards put them back in place.

While this is working now somehow I would appreciate if someone could point me to a solution that works in a cleaner way with less hot glue and gaffa tape. 😃

Thanks a lot in advance,

Oliver