Can I have turbo build include an individual "apps" dependencies in the dist?

[kevin-mitchell]

Summary

I'm using turborepo to build individual Lambda functions, but would like the build output for each app to (optionally) include all of the dependencies from each individual package.json file in node_modules. Looking for some guidance. I'm fairly certain based on my googling so far that "this is the job of a bundler" is the answer, but I'm hoping for a bit more guidance here if possible!

Additional information

I have a turborepo setup where each app is a different AWS Lambda function (the fact this is Lambda doesn't really matter, but just for context).

I am writing everything in TypeScript, and each "app" is very simple generally (one, maybe two TS files). For the most part I have no external dependencies because I'm using the AWS SDK which is available in the Lambda runtime, so I just have it set as a dev dependency for now (again, this doesn't matter but just for context).

I now have a situation where I need to use an external dependency, and my package.json file looks like this:

{
  "name": "lambda-api-server",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "compile": "tsc",
    "build": "tsc",
    "dev": "npm run compile && node ./dist/index.js",
    "test": "echo 'ok'"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "type": "module",
  "devDependencies": {
    "@aws-sdk/client-sns": "^3.629.0",
    "@repo/eslint-config": "*",
    "@repo/typescript-config": "*",
    "@types/node": "^20.12.7",
    "aws-cdk": "^2.141.0",
    "aws-cdk-lib": "^2.141.0",
    "typescript": "^5.4.5"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "graphql": "^16.8.1",
    "ksuid": "^3.0.0"
  }
}

ksuid and graphql (and their dependency trees) I need to be included with my deployed function and ideally that would mean when I run turbo build somehow, "magically", turbo does whatever it needs to do to move the dependencies from the shared root node_modules into the dist.

It's outside of the scope of turbo again but for context I'm essentially running turbo build followed by cdk deploy, and each lambda function is being deployed from the dist directory. So again ideally after turbo build all required dependencies would be included in the dist.

I am fairly certain the fact that I'm asking this question means I'm "doing it wrong", but am still hoping for some advice as to how I should be handling this setup - to be entirely honest I'm not even sure using turborepo is the right choice for me here but I've enjoyed working with it in the past with a NextJS project and other than this bundling issue it's been working great for me to manage a lot of individual small apps.

Thank you very much!

### Example

_No response_

[hsellik]

I assume that you have package.json file for each app separately and workspaces are set up correctly in the root package.json. Isn't turbo build already including all the required dependencies in the dist folder by default?

It should be more like yarn/npm/pnpm workspaces magic rather than turbo magic.

[kevin-mitchell]

Thanks for the reply!

So I decided to try to start from a simpler project and see if I was missing something and sure enough, until I introduced something like rollup or esbuild or another bundler I was not ending up with my dependencies included in the project.

So I went back and setup esbuild in each of my "apps" and that resolved my issue. I don't end up with node_modules but that's probably fine / for the best (?), but my dependencies are all bundled with my final build artifact (i.e. index.ts -> index.js which has all of the dependencies included).

[kevin-mitchell]

In the end I realized even a simple project without turborepo, just a flat npm init project with typescript, I don't magically get my dependencies included for me, I have to (obvious I realize) include some other build step, i.e. a bundler such as esbuild or rollup (I ended up using esbuild).

In my simple case it was enough to

1. npm install esbuild esbuild-plugin-tsc --save-dev
2. and add a file esbuild.config.mjs with this config:

import * as esbuild from 'esbuild'

await esbuild.build({
  entryPoints: ['src/index.ts'],
  bundle: true,
  outfile: 'dist/index.js',
  platform: 'node'
})

3. For my build script run node esbuild.config.mjs

Again this is really outside of the concern of turborepo, but hopefully somebody in a similar confused state might find this.