Node.js multi package project?

Question

I'm new to Node, coming from a Java background. These days I'm experimenting with each part of a full application: database, rest api, ui.

So far I wrote the database-backed logic, which runs on its own, processes text files, store data about them in the database and exposes a REST API to query that data. I'm now going to make the ui to navigate that data.

Would it be reasonable having a structure like this:

- (a) main project folder
    - (b) backend application (a Restify server responds to REST calls querying the database)
    - (c) ui application (an http server serves React static files)

If that makes sense, I would guess that:

• (b) has a package.json with server- and rest- related dependencies (i.e. Restify, MongoDB, ...)
• (c) has another package.json with dependencies for ui (i.e. React, Webpack, etc, but not Restify or MongoDB)
• (a) has a third package.json which cares for installing each sub-project (I'd say by running npm install through hand-written npm-scripts). Otherwise, how do you usually handle such Node projects? Do you keep each application completely separate from the rest?

For those who know that tool, this mimics a Maven multi-module project; though that level of automation is not needed, I'd just like to come up with a self-contained package.

Answer 1

These project structures are called as monorepos - A single node project repository that contains multiple packages. There are tools like Lerna. If you are using yarn as package manager, it comes with experimental feature of workspaces.