Turborepo

What This Skill Does

Turborepo is a high-performance build system designed for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos. It optimizes development workflows by caching task outputs and executing tasks in parallel across your entire dependency graph. When you use this skill, OpenClaw intelligently manages your turbo.json configuration, ensuring that build tasks are registered correctly, dependencies are mapped through dependsOn pipelines, and the remote cache is properly utilized to prevent redundant work. It excels at managing workspace-heavy projects, such as those using pnpm, npm, or yarn workspaces, by ensuring that every build, lint, and test step is handled with maximum efficiency.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, run the following command in your terminal:

npx clawhub@latest install turborepo

Use Cases

• Monorepo Scaling: When your project grows to include multiple apps and packages, use Turborepo to ensure that a change in one package only triggers relevant downstream tasks.
• CI/CD Optimization: Accelerate your deployment pipelines by leveraging remote caching, ensuring your CI environment doesn't waste time rebuilding artifacts that have already been generated.
• Task Orchestration: Define complex dependency graphs where test tasks wait for build tasks, and build tasks wait for prerequisite package builds, all without manual script chaining.
• Affected Builds: Use the --affected flag to isolate and build or test only the specific components that have changed since the last deployment.

Example Prompts

1. "OpenClaw, please analyze my current monorepo structure and suggest a turbo.json that sets up a build pipeline where tests depend on the build output."
2. "I am seeing cache misses on my CI server for the ui package builds. Help me debug my turbo.json inputs to ensure cache hits are properly registered."
3. "Refactor my root package.json to move all direct task execution into their respective package directories and delegate properly using turbo run."

Tips & Limitations

• Follow the Pattern: Always define tasks within individual package package.json files. Never attempt to run package-level logic from the root package.json directly.
• Explicit Delegation: Always use turbo run within your configuration files, scripts, and CI workflows. Avoid the shorthand turbo command except for direct manual interaction in the terminal.
• Pipeline Integrity: Avoid using && to chain commands. Let Turborepo's dependsOn field handle the sequencing; this ensures that if a step fails, the pipeline correctly halts, and it allows for maximum parallel execution on systems with high CPU core counts.
• Environment Variables: Keep .env files scoped to the package level. Avoid putting secrets or configuration at the repository root to prevent cache invalidation across unrelated projects.