Managing 30 CLI Tools in a Monorepo: Lessons from the Trenches

Managing 30 CLI Tools in a Monorepo: Lessons from the Trenches When you publish your first CLI tool to npm, everything feels simple. One repo, one package.json , one build step. By the time you hit five tools, you start noticing friction -- duplicated configs, inconsistent patterns, version drift across shared dependencies. At thirty tools, you either have a system or you have chaos. Over the past year, I have built and maintained a collection of over thirty npm CLI tools from a single monorepo. What started as scattered repositories eventually consolidated into a unified workspace that handles TypeScript compilation, testing, versioning, and publishing for every tool from one root. This article covers the real architecture, the real tradeoffs, and the real numbers from that journey. Why Monorepos Make Sense for CLI Collections The argument for monorepos usually centers on large application codebases -- Google, Meta, and similar companies managing millions of lines of code in a single