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Monorepo Deployment Strategies: A Practical Guide - Virex

Managing deployments in a monorepo can be tricky. Learn strategies for efficient builds, smart caching, and independent service deployments.

Sarah Mitchell September 1, 2025 4 min read
deployment tutorial development

Monorepos are increasingly popular, and for good reason. They simplify dependency management, enable atomic changes across services, and improve code sharing. But they also introduce deployment challenges.

How do you avoid rebuilding everything when only one service changed? How do you manage independent release cycles? This guide covers practical strategies we’ve developed at Virex.

The Monorepo Deployment Challenge

In a traditional multi-repo setup, each repository has its own CI/CD pipeline. Changes trigger builds only for that specific service.

Monorepos break this model. A single commit might touch multiple services, or it might touch none at all (documentation changes, for example). Naive approaches lead to:

  • Unnecessarily long build times
  • Wasted compute resources
  • Slower feedback loops

Strategy 1: Affected Package Detection

The first optimization is detecting which packages actually changed. Most monorepo tools support this:

# Turborepo
turbo run build --filter=...[origin/main]

# Nx
nx affected --target=build

# Lerna
lerna run build --since=origin/main

This approach only builds packages that changed or depend on changed packages.

How Virex Handles This

When you connect a monorepo to Virex, we automatically detect your package manager and monorepo tool. Our build system:

  1. Analyzes the commit diff
  2. Determines affected packages
  3. Builds only what’s necessary
  4. Caches everything else

This typically reduces build times by 60-80%.

Strategy 2: Intelligent Caching

Caching is crucial for monorepo performance. But cache invalidation is notoriously difficult.

Layer Your Caches

We recommend a three-tier caching strategy:

Dependency cache: Cache node_modules based on lockfile hash. This rarely changes and saves the most time.

Build cache: Cache build outputs based on source file hashes. Turborepo and Nx handle this automatically.

Deploy cache: Cache deployment artifacts. If nothing changed, skip the deploy entirely.

Remote Caching

Local caches don’t help in CI environments where each build starts fresh. Remote caching solves this:

  • Build artifacts are stored in a shared cache
  • CI jobs pull cached results instead of rebuilding
  • Teams share cache across all developers

Virex provides built-in remote caching for all monorepo deployments.

Strategy 3: Independent Deployments

Not every service needs to deploy together. In fact, coupling deployments creates unnecessary risk.

Service Boundaries

Define clear boundaries between services:

apps/
  web/          # Main website
  dashboard/    # Admin dashboard
  api/          # Backend API
packages/
  ui/           # Shared components
  utils/        # Shared utilities

Each app can deploy independently. Shared packages trigger rebuilds of dependent apps.

Deployment Configuration

In Virex, you can configure multiple deployment targets from a single monorepo:

{
  "deployments": [
    {
      "name": "web",
      "root": "apps/web",
      "buildCommand": "turbo run build --filter=web"
    },
    {
      "name": "dashboard", 
      "root": "apps/dashboard",
      "buildCommand": "turbo run build --filter=dashboard"
    }
  ]
}

Each deployment gets its own URL, environment variables, and deployment history.

Strategy 4: Preview Deployments

Preview deployments are even more valuable in monorepos. When a PR touches multiple services, you want to preview all of them.

Linked Previews

Virex creates linked preview deployments:

  • Each affected service gets its own preview URL
  • Services are configured to communicate with each other’s previews
  • The PR shows all preview links in one place

This lets reviewers test the complete change, not just individual pieces.

Common Pitfalls

Pitfall 1: Over-Coupling

Just because code is in a monorepo doesn’t mean it should be tightly coupled. Maintain clear interfaces between services.

Pitfall 2: Ignoring Build Performance

Monorepo builds can become painfully slow. Invest in caching and affected detection early, before it becomes a problem.

Pitfall 3: Shared Configuration Drift

It’s easy for services to drift apart in configuration. Use shared configs for linting, TypeScript, and testing.

Getting Started

If you’re deploying a monorepo to Virex:

  1. Connect your repository
  2. We’ll auto-detect your monorepo structure
  3. Configure deployment targets for each app
  4. Push and watch the magic happen

Need help? Our documentation covers monorepo setup in detail, or reach out to our support team.