How to build a pnpm monorepo, the right way

At some point every growing application ends up with code that needs to be shared across surfaces. Maybe you started with a web app and then needed to build a mobile app alongside it, and suddenly a whole layer of shared logic — the design system, the business logic, the API layer — needs to live somewhere both can reach. When that happens, you have two options: extract the shared code into a separate repository, or set up a monorepo. With separate repositories, iterating on shared code becomes a slow, multi-step process: make a change, propagate it to every consumer, and then test to see if it actually works. What should be a quick tweak becomes an afternoon. A monorepo solves this by keeping shared packages and their consumers in the same place. Changes to shared code are immediately visible to every consumer, making it easier to iterate and test. For this guide, we'll be using pnpm workspaces, which supports hard-linking dependencies (more on that later). How to set up a pnpm worksp