Getting Started

Melos requires a few one-off steps to be completed before you can start using it.

Installation

Melos can be installed as a global package via pub.dev:

dart pub global activate melos

Setup

To setup your project to use Melos, create a melos.yaml file in the root of the project.

New project? Use melos init to initialize the file and an empty packages directory.

Within the melos.yaml file, add name and packages fields:

name: my_project

packages:
  - packages/**

The packages list should contain paths to the individual packages within your project. Each path can be defined using the glob pattern expansion format.

Bootstrapping

Once installed & setup, Melos needs to be bootstrapped. Bootstrapping has 2 primary roles:

Installing all package dependencies (internally using pub get).
Locally linking any packages together.

Why do I need to bootstrap?

In normal projects, packages can be linked by providing a path within the pubspec.yaml. This works for small projects however presents a problem at scale. Packages cannot be published with a locally defined path, meaning once you're ready to publish your packages you'll need to manually update all of the packages pubspec.yaml files with the versions. If your packages are also tightly coupled (dependencies of each other), you'll also have to manually check which versions should be updated. Even with a small number of packages this can become a long and error-prone task.

Melos solves this problem by overriding local files which the Dart analyzer uses to read packages from. If a local package exists (defined in the melos.yaml file) and a different local package has it listed as a dependency, it will be linked regardless of whether a version has been specified.

Next steps

Once successfully bootstrapped, you can develop your packages side-by-side with changes to a single package immediately reflecting across other dependant packages.

Melos also provides other helpful features such as running scripts across all packages. For example, to create a script which analyzes all packages source code for errors (using tuneup.dart), add a new script item in your melos.yaml:

name: my_project

packages:
  - packages/**

scripts:
  analyze: melos exec -- pub global run tuneup check

Then execute the command by running melos run analyze.