Migrating a Tauri application to a moon monorepo

Dec 03 2024

Project file structure

Moon doesn’t enforce any type of monorepo file structure, but for an easy to set up and maintainable project I use the following:

tauri/
├── src/
│   ├── routes/
│   ├── app.html
│   └── moon.yml
├── src-tauri/
│   ├── src/
│   │   ├── lib.rs
│   │   └── main.rs
│   ├── target/
│   ├── build.rs
│   ├── tauri.conf.json
│   └── moon.yml
├── packages.json
└── ...

The above setup is a Sveltekit + Tauri setup.
If you want similar tree diagrams, head on over to https://tree.nathanfriend.com/

Initializing moon

moon init

This creates a .moon/ directory at the roon of the project. Inside it there is a workspace.yml file.

The workspace.yml file tells moon where the projects are located (in our case in src/ and src-tauri).

Configuring moon

workspace.yml

Moon documentation: https://moonrepo.dev/docs/config/workspace

# https://moonrepo.dev/docs/config/workspace
$schema: 'https://moonrepo.dev/schemas/workspace.json'

projects:
  frontend: 'src'
  backend: 'src-tauri'

vcs: # version control system
  manager: 'git'
  provider: 'github'
  defaultBranch: 'main'
  hooks:
    pre-commit:
      - 'moon run :lint :format --affected --status=staged'

telemetry: false

versionConstraint: '>=1.30.2' # moon minimal version

moon.yml

Each project must have a moon.yml, which tells moon how the project should be handled.

It must contain a name and a description, other metadata is optional. The language, for example, is inherited from the files in the project but may be optionally specified.

Tasks define the, you guessed it, tasks that can be run, for brevity, here are the tasks I want configured:

frontend
- build: cd ../ && bun run build
- dev: cd ../ && bun run dev
backend
- build: cargo build
- dev: bunx tauri dev

To run each task you just have to write moon run <project-name>:<task>. For example, if I wanted to build the web portion of my Tauri app I would just run moon run frontend:build.

Frontend (`src/moon.yml`)

$schema: "https://moonrepo.dev/schemas/project.json"

language: "typescript"

project:
  name: "Tauri Frontend"
  description: "Frontend of the Tauri application"

stack: "frontend"

tags:
  - "svelte"
  - "tauri"

type: "application"

tasks:
  build:
    command: "cd ../ && bun run build"
  dev:
    command: "cd ../ && bun run dev"

Backend (`src-tauri/moon.yml`)

$schema: "https://moonrepo.dev/schemas/project.json"

language: "rust"

project:
  name: "Tauri Backend"
  description: "Backend of the Tauri application"

stack: "backend"

tags:
  - "rust"
  - "tauri"

type: "application"

platform: "rust"

tasks:
  build:
    command: "cargo build"
  dev:
    command: "bunx tauri dev"

dependsOn:
  - "frontend"

Installing moon

According to the moon website the best way is to use their proto version and toolchain manager, but you can install it as an npm package as well, or get it from your distro’s package manager.

proto install moon # using proto
yay moon-bin # or get it from the AUR
bun install --save-dev @moonrepo/cli # using npm/bun

Alright, that should be it, happy coding!