Ways to put turbo commands into the package.json of packages

[serkodev]

Goals

Allow to put turbo commands into the package.json of packages

Non-goals

No response

Background

For users who have not installed turbo globally, they will need to run commands within sub-packages using pnpm turbo <command> instead of turbo <command>. If they only run pnpm build without explicitly using Turbo, some dependencies' build from workspace might not be updated.

However, if we include turbo run <command> inside package.json, as mentioned in the documentation, this could result in recursive calls.

You only want to write turbo commands in your root package.json. Writing turbo commands into the package.json of packages can lead to recursively calling turbo.

So I want to find a way to let user able to put turbo command in sub packages scripts and able to run it in both inside sub packages or from root package.

Related: #1232

Proposal

Solution 1: Check if Turbo is running recursively

I’m not sure if there’s currently a way to check if Turbo itself is running recursively, but if possible, it would be helpful to have a mechanism that skips repeated tasks when this occurs.

Solution 2: Add a --prepare flag to the run command

Introduce a --prepare flag to the run command, which will execute the dependsOn task only, without running the command from the package itself.

Example:

Original:

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "next build"
  }
}

After:

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "turbo run build --prepare && next build"
  }
}

Now, if we run pnpm build, it will execute turbo run build --prepare, followed by next build. If the command is run from the root, it will automatically detect that it is already running inside a Turbo process and skip the prepare task.

[AlexAegis]

What I'm doing is all my tasks are postfixed with _ so I can have a non postfixed version that invokes turbo

For example I have this in individual packages in my monorepo:

{
	"scripts": {
		"test": "turbo run test_ --concurrency 16 --filter @org/package",
		"test_": "vitest --passWithNoTests --coverage --run",
	}
}

If I understood your problem correctly, this approach would eliminate your problem. Here's an example of this in one of my repos: https://github.com/AlexAegis/js-tooling I don't directly invoke turbo and I can invoke tasks in sub-packages too and have turbo execute all dependencies as expected.

[serkodev]

BTW, for the scripts inside sub-packages, you can use it without --filter because of Automatic Package Scoping.

{
  "name": "@org/package",
  "scripts": {
-    "test": "turbo run test_ --concurrency 16 --filter @org/package",
+    "test": "turbo run test_ --concurrency 16",
    "test_": "vitest --passWithNoTests --coverage --run",
  }
}

[serkodev]

@AlexAegis Thanks, seems this is a workaround for now.

[anthonyshew]

This doesn't answer directly to the intent of your post, but I did notice this and wanted to make sure you knew about it.

Introduce a --prepare flag to the run command, which will execute the dependsOn task only

This is possible with turbo run my-task --filter=my-package^.... This combination of filter microsyntaxes only runs the task for my-packages dependencies, as you're describing.