Turborepo 2.x and the Rustification Trend
The monorepo landscape has matured significantly, moving beyond a niche enterprise pattern to a pragmatic choice for teams of all sizes. As we step into 2026, the tooling ecosystem for monorepos, particularly around Turborepo, Nx, and Lerna, has seen a flurry of activity, pushing the boundaries of performance, developer experience, and intelligent automation. Having spent considerable time putting these updates through their paces, I'm here to walk you through the practical implications of these recent developments. This isn't marketing fluff; it's a breakdown of what works, why it matters, and how to leverage these advancements in your daily development workflow.
Precision with the --affected Flag
Turborepo, maintained by Vercel, has been on a relentless release cadence throughout 2024 and 2025, culminating in the 2.x series, which has fundamentally refined task execution and developer ergonomics. The core philosophy remains: do the least amount of work necessary.
Let me walk you through the --affected flag, a cornerstone of this efficiency. Introduced in Turborepo 2.1 (August 2024), this flag allows you to run tasks only for packages that have changed since a specified baseline (typically your default branch) and their dependent packages within the monorepo's dependency graph. This is not merely a filter; it’s an intelligent graph traversal.
Here's exactly how to use it:
# Run build and test tasks only for affected packages and their dependents
turbo run build test --affected -- --base=origin/main
The --base=origin/main argument is crucial. It tells Turborepo to compare your current branch against origin/main to determine the set of changed files. The subsequent -- separates Turborepo's flags from those passed directly to the underlying build or test scripts. This means if your build script accepts a --minify flag, you'd execute turbo run build --affected -- --minify.
The impact on CI/CD Deep Dive: Why Jenkins, GitLab, and CircleCI Still Rule in 2026 pipelines is substantial. Imagine a monorepo with dozens of services and libraries. Prior to this, a simple change in a deeply nested utility package might trigger full builds and tests across many unrelated applications. With --affected, only the utility package and the direct consumers of that utility will execute their tasks, drastically cutting down CI times.
Composable Configuration
Another significant enhancement is Composable Configuration, introduced in Turborepo 2.7 (December 2025). Previously, managing a complex turbo.json could become unwieldy, especially when different package types required similar but slightly varied pipeline definitions. Composable Configuration addresses this by allowing you to define reusable snippets and extend them. You can use this JSON Formatter to verify your structure if you are migrating complex configurations.
Consider a scenario where all your web applications share a common build process, but each api service has a distinct testing setup. You can now structure your turbo.jsonc like this:
// turbo.jsonc
{
"$schema": "https://turborepo.com/schema.json",
"pipeline": {
"build#base": {
"dependsOn": ["^build"],
"outputs": ["dist/**", ".next/**"],
"cache": true
},
"build:web": {
"extends": ["build#base"],
"inputs": ["src/**/*.ts", "src/**/*.tsx", "public/**"]
},
"build:api": {
"extends": ["build#base"],
"inputs": ["src/**/*.ts"]
},
"test#base": {
"dependsOn": ["build"],
"outputs": [],
"cache": true
},
"test:web": {
"extends": ["test#base"],
"command": "vitest --run"
},
"test:api": {
"extends": ["test#base"],
"command": "jest"
}
}
}
The Shift to Rust
One of the most profound trends has been the strategic migration of core components to Rust. Turborepo's journey to Rust began in late 2023, moving from Go to extract maximum performance for hashing and graph traversal. Rust offers unparalleled control over system resources and memory safety, which are paramount for build systems that constantly analyze file systems.
Nx is following a similar path. In late 2024, Nx announced its plan to migrate its core from TypeScript to Rust, targeting completion in 2025. The goals are clear: improve speed, reduce package size, and enable a more powerful CLI. By moving the core to a compiled language, Nx aims to eliminate Node.js runtime overheads, making it even faster for polyglot monorepos.
Nx's Build Intelligence Platform
Nx has significantly expanded its vision, evolving into what it calls a "Build Intelligence Platform" in 2025. This isn't just about faster builds; it's about making CI/CD more intelligent and proactive through AI integration.
AI and the Nx MCP Server
A standout feature is the Nx MCP server (Monorepo Context Protocol server). This gives AI assistants meaningful context within your complex monorepo. Traditional LLMs are "working blind," but the Nx MCP server provides AI agents deep access to workspace structure, project dependencies, and task configurations. If your AI assistant is integrated with Nx, you could ask it: "Why is my-app's build failing after my last commit?" The AI can then analyze the dependency graph and live build logs to provide specific debugging suggestions.
Self-Healing CI and Observability
Nx's focus on a "Self-Healing CI" is driven by enhanced Enterprise Observability. This suite of features aims to shift teams from reactive debugging to proactive issue resolution:
- Task Analytics: Provides historical performance data for every task. You can spot performance regressions the day they happen.
- Flaky Task Analytics: Identifies which flaky tests are causing the most reruns and wasted time.
- Agent Resource Usage: Offers process-level visibility into CI resource consumption.
The Nx Daemon
Underpinning much of Nx's responsiveness is the Nx Daemon, a persistent background process that watches for file changes and intelligently updates the project graph in memory. This architecture solves the "cold start" problem inherent in graph-based build systems.
Lerna's Modern Evolution
Lerna, once the de-facto standard, experienced uncertainty before being re-stewarded by the Nx team. Since then, it has become "fast, modern, and battle-tested" by leveraging Nx's underlying task execution engine.
OIDC Trusted Publishing
A major feature in Lerna 9 (September 2025) is OIDC Trusted Publishing support. This eliminates the need to store static npm tokens in CI environments. Instead, your CI/CD workflow can directly exchange short-lived OIDC tokens with npm, verifying the publishing identity through your OIDC provider. This significantly reduces the attack surface associated with long-lived credentials.
Modernizing Package Management
Lerna 9 formally removed legacy package management commands like lerna add and lerna bootstrap. This pushes users towards the native workspace features of npm, Yarn, pnpm, or Bun. Your package.json should now define workspaces directly:
// package.json (root)
{
"name": "my-monorepo",
"private": true,
"workspaces": ["packages/*", "apps/*"]
}
Caching Strategies and Dependency Graphs
Caching is the bedrock of monorepo performance. The latest iterations of these tools have advanced their capabilities with a strong emphasis on remote and distributed caching.
Local, Remote, and Distributed Caching
All three tools employ local computational caching. If a task has been run previously with the same inputs, the tool restores the cached outputs instantly. For remote caching, Turborepo offers a seamless experience with Vercel Remote Cache, which became free for repositories linked to Vercel in late 2024. To enable it, you simply run turbo login and turbo link.
Here's an example of a build task in turbo.json configured for environment-aware caching:
// turbo.json
{
"$schema": "https://turborepo.com/schema.json",
"pipeline": {
"build": {
"dependsOn": ["^build"],
"outputs": ["dist/**", ".next/**"],
"inputs": ["src/**/*.ts", "src/**/*.tsx", "public/**", "config/*.json"],
"env": ["NODE_ENV", "NEXT_PUBLIC_API_URL"]
}
}
}
The Dependency Graph as a First-Class Citizen
The dependency graph is the intelligence layer that enables affected commands and parallelization. Turborepo uses this graph for its --affected command, while Nx provides an interactive visualizer via nx graph. This tool helps identify the impact of changes and identify potential circular dependencies. The graph isn't just for visualization; it's the engine behind parallel task execution, determining which tasks can run concurrently based on their relationships.
Expert Insights and Reality Checks
Looking ahead, the trajectory points towards a deeper convergence with broader developer platforms. The lines between a build system and a CI orchestrator are blurring.
The Converging Future of Build Systems
I predict these tools will increasingly provide higher-level abstractions encapsulating how code is deployed and monitored. The focus on Rust rewrites is about building a resource-efficient foundation to support these complex features without bogging down infrastructure. However, this convergence brings trade-offs, such as potential vendor lock-in with tightly coupled ecosystems like Vercel + Turborepo or Nx Cloud + Nx.
Current Limitations and Challenges
Despite the advancements, challenges persist. Initial Setup Complexity remains high for truly large, polyglot monorepos. Debugging Remote Cache Issues can be difficult when misconfigured inputs lead to stale artifacts. Furthermore, while the core tools are moving toward Rust, the Plugin Ecosystems are still predominantly JavaScript-centric. Finally, for very small projects, the "monorepo tax" in terms of learning curve and configuration can still outweigh the benefits. The trajectory is clear: these tools are becoming indispensable, but they require disciplined workflows to truly succeed.
Sources
This article was published by the DataFormatHub Editorial Team, a group of developers and data enthusiasts dedicated to making data transformation accessible and private. Our goal is to provide high-quality technical insights alongside our suite of privacy-first developer tools.
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