Say hello to rix1-builds

Tired of copy-pasting content and components (and setup) between different repos, I decided to restructure how my hobby projects were organized.

I've been setting up a Turborepo and started migrating rix1/relativity (this site) over.

This is also the place I'm building FlowWriter, although that's not live at the time of writing (2022-05-22 Sunday at 23:51).

In this short post, I just thought I'd share (and document) how I've set up Prettier, ESlint, Tailwind and Typescript in this monorepo. I went through a couple of iterations before I felt happy with my setup, so hopefully others have to go through the hoops as I did.

In any case, I want to use this as a reference for future-rix to remember what the hell I was thinking.

Setting up a new app

In ./packages/config/ I've defined shared configurations for ESlint, Prettier, Tailwind and TypeScript. When setting up a new submodule, I should only need to install typescript, and add two new entries to my package.json:

// File: package.json
"devDependencies": {
  "config": "workspace:*",
  "tsconfig": "workspace:*",
}

Notice how I don't install Tailwind, ESlint nor Prettier in the submodules. This is all extended from config/. Next, I need to create a couple of files:

cd apps/new-app/

# Required for tailwind
touch postcss.config.js
touch tailwind.config.js

# Prettier & ESlint
touch prettier.config.js
touch .eslintrc.js

# TypeScript
touch tsconfig.json # If it doesn't exsist already

Depending on the type of configuration file, they can either be extended or they simply reference the template file I have in /packages/config/.

Let's look examples for each of them:

postcss.config.js

After testing out a few combinations, it looks like I don't need this file for the app to build Tailwind classes during production build (pnpm run build). However, we need it for local development:

// File: apps/new-app/postcss.config.js
module.exports = require("config/postcss.config");

tailwind.config.js

For Tailwind we can leverage the presets key, so the file looks like this:

// File: apps/new-app/tailwind.config.js
/** @type {import('tailwindcss').Config} */

module.exports = {
  theme: {
    extend: {},
  },
  plugins: [],
  presets: [require("config/tailwind.config")],
};

prettier.config.js

Because Tailwind have a Prettier plugin (for sorting class names), you need to deceide which configuration file you want to reference:

// File: apps/new-app/prettier.config.js
module.exports = require("config/prettier.config");
// or
module.exports = require("config/prettier.tailwind.config.js");

I'm still a bit on the fence about wheather I like the class name sorting or not. It has the benefit of consistency, but it's a bit cumbersome that class names jump around when saving. Especially when testing out different variants.

Also, it's obviously not working when using clsx() to concatinate class names.

For reference, the prettier.tailwind.config.js file adds the following two properties:

// File: packages/config/prettier.tailwind.config.js
module.exports = {
  // ... default config
  tailwindConfig: "tailwind.config.js",
  plugins: [require("prettier-plugin-tailwindcss")],
};

Note: It's important that you actually reference this file in your package.json, if you might experience inconsistencies in formatting between your IDE and when running the CLI. See Testing the configuration section below.

.eslintrc.js

I couldn't figure out how to properly use the extends key, so I'm simply just referencing the shared configuration file like this:

// File: apps/new-app/.eslintrc.js
module.exports = require("config/eslint-config");

Testing the configuration

To test that everything works, I suggest you add a few scripts to the submodule's package.json. The following are all standard across my apps:

// File: apps/new-app/package.json
"scripts": {
  // ... other scripts
  "lint": "eslint . --cache",
  "ts": "tsc --noemit",
  "prettier": "prettier --check . --config ./prettier.config.js --ignore-path ../../.prettierignore",
  "test": "pnpm prettier && pnpm eslint && pnpm ts"
}

A couple of things to note here:

1. The ESlint script is named lint so that Turborepo will use the correct script when running turbo run lint.
2. I also have a shared .prettierignore at the root level of the Turborepo. And yes, I know test doesn't actually run any tests... But I like having one command that I can run on pre-push or on CI to ensure at least something is working.
3. Notice the --config ./prettier.config.js flag. It took me some time to realize that Prettier CLI prefers default options (CLI arguments) over configuration files. This caused inconsistent formatting between my IDE (vscode) and the npm script. With the --config flag, I ensure that the same configuration is used across my IDE and CLI.

Bringing it all together

In the top level package.json, we can now define some scripts to ensure our entire code base is formatted correctly and follow a consistent code style:

// File
"scripts": {
  // ...other scripts
  "lint": "turbo run lint",
  "format": "prettier --write \"**/*.{ts,tsx,md}\""
}

These two will run on all sub-modules and Turborepo will cache the results (at least of lint).

Some rules have emerged as I've configured this:

1. Prefer shared configuration. Extend, import or reference other files as presets as much as possible.
2. Institutionalize scripts. Keep the same scripts across apps.
3. Test and ensure that IDE and CLI use the same configuration. This might not be the case, which will lead to a lot of confusion. To ensure this, I suggest throwing a --verbose or --loglevel debug flag on your CLI commands, as well as checking the output from your editor integration (e.g. VScode has a separate tab for Prettier output)

Reference

Here's the current file structure:

.
├── package.json
├── .prettierignore
├── apps
│   ├── flow-writer
│   │   ├── postcss.config.js
│   │   ├── prettier.config.js
│   │   ├── tailwind.config.js
│   │   └── tsconfig.json
│   └── rix1.dev
│       ├── postcss.config.js
│       ├── prettier.config.js
│       ├── tailwind.config.js
│       └── tsconfig.json
├── packages
│   ├── config
│   │   ├── eslint-preset.js
│   │   ├── package.json
│   │   ├── postcss.config.js
│   │   ├── prettier.config.js
│   │   ├── prettier.tailwind.config.js
│   │   └── tailwind.config.js
│   ├── tsconfig
│   │   ├── base.json
│   │   ├── nextjs.json
│   │   ├── package.json
│   │   └── react-library.json
├── pnpm-lock.yaml
├── pnpm-workspace.yaml
└── turbo.json

That's it for now! Hope you find this useful in the future Rix1 👋