Turborepo Design System Starter

This is a community-maintained example. If you experience a problem, please submit a pull request with a fix. GitHub Issues will be closed.

This guide explains how to use a React design system starter powered by:

• 🏎 Turborepo — High-performance build system for Monorepos
• 🚀 React — JavaScript library for user interfaces
• 🛠 Tsup — TypeScript bundler powered by esbuild
• 📖 Storybook — UI component environment powered by Vite

As well as a few others tools preconfigured:

• TypeScript for static type checking
• ESLint for code linting
• Prettier for code formatting
• Changesets for managing versioning and changelogs
• GitHub Actions for fully automated package publishing

Using this example

Run the following command:

npx create-turbo@latest -e design-system

Useful Commands

• pnpm build - Build all packages, including the Storybook site
• pnpm dev - Run all packages locally and preview with Storybook
• pnpm lint - Lint all packages
• pnpm changeset - Generate a changeset
• pnpm clean - Clean up all node_modules and dist folders (runs each package's clean script)

Turborepo

Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases. It was designed after the workflows used by massive software engineering organizations to ship code at scale. Turborepo abstracts the complex configuration needed for monorepos and provides fast, incremental builds with zero-configuration remote caching.

Using Turborepo simplifies managing your design system monorepo, as you can have a single lint, build, test, and release process for all packages. Learn more about how monorepos improve your development workflow.

Apps & Packages

This Turborepo includes the following packages and applications:

• apps/docs: Component documentation site with Storybook
• packages/ui: Core React components
• packages/typescript-config: Shared tsconfig.jsons used throughout the Turborepo
• packages/eslint-config: ESLint preset

Each package and app is 100% TypeScript. Workspaces enables us to "hoist" dependencies that are shared between packages to the root package.json. This means smaller node_modules folders and a better local dev experience. To install a dependency for the entire monorepo, use the -w workspaces flag with pnpm add.

This example sets up your .gitignore to exclude all generated files, other folders like node_modules used to store your dependencies.

Compilation

To make the ui library code work across all browsers, we need to compile the raw TypeScript and React code to plain JavaScript. We can accomplish this with tsup, which uses esbuild to greatly improve performance.

Running pnpm build from the root of the Turborepo will run the build command defined in each package's package.json file. Turborepo runs each build in parallel and caches & hashes the output to speed up future builds.

For @acme/ui, the build command is equivalent to the following:

tsup src/*.tsx --format esm,cjs --dts --external react

tsup compiles all of the components in the design system individually, into both ES Modules and CommonJS formats as well as their TypeScript types. The package.json for @acme/ui then instructs the consumer to select the correct format:

{
  "name": "@acme/ui\