Refactor repo as nx monorepo

[wlthomson]

Idea of this issue is to get a discussion going and decide how we might want to organise are project in a way that makes managing our front-end and multiple back-end dependencies a bit easier.

Expected Behavior

Some of the things I think we could benefit from:

• Shared dev configs (prettier, babel, typescript, etc.)
• Shared types (e.g. shared interfaces/schemas for consistency between front-end and back-end services).
• Shared data (e.g. data for populating back-end can also be used by front-end as test fixtures).
• End-to-end (E2E) testing (e.g. test services working together to replicate functionality in the wild).
• Easier scalability (e.g. if we decided to separate the admin portal out as a separate web app, this would be made easy with shared components etc.).

Current Behavior

Currently we manage all our projects separately. This has already been a bit tricky (e.g. setting up tests), and I think this could get a bit messy as we scale. Thinking is that we could benefit a lot from having some tools to speed things up and to keep things nice and tidy (would also be a good chance to research monorepo toolkits for omsupply).

Possible Solution

A few possible options:

• bazel.
• baur.
• buck.
• lerna.
• nx.
• pants.

Of these, nx stands out to me as the most comprehensive and best documented... but feedback welcome!

[wlthomson]

@mark-prins @katherine-sussol Any thoughts?

[kat-ms]

Initial thoughts: Have had an initial look at nx and created a sample workspace.

Default structure (created with nx CLI commands) looks a bit like this:

<workspace_name>\
  apps\
    app1\
      src\
          app\
            file1.ts
            file2.ts
          assets\
          environments\
    app2\
      src\
          app\
          assets\
          environments\
  libs\
  dist\
    <transpiled versions of apps>
  tools\

For initial refactor, current thinking/approach is just grabbing everything we currently have as a 'folder' under unified-codes and adding it as an app in the nx workspace (using nx generate) E.g

• api (using @nrwl/node)
• data-service (using @nrwl/node)
• web (using @nrwl/react)

We can then look at what can be split out into a lib or shared code (already with this approach base versions of config files now live in the parent folder rather than under individual apps folders - which can be overridden in the specific app directories)

These plugins have their own default builder commands for building/testing/linting/serving applications (replacing the existing npm scripts we have per project). E.g for api:

• nx build api
• nx serve api
• nx test api

[wlthomson]

@katherine-sussol Nice!

Don't have much to add, just to mention that we will also need to add auth-service (using @nrwl/node), which is currently under data-service.