As a codebase grows into multiple packages (a shared UI library, multiple apps, shared utils), managing builds becomes painful:

• Running npm run build rebuilds everything from scratch every time
• CI pipelines take 10+ minutes even when only one package changed
• No standard way to define which tasks depend on which other tasks
• Running tests across all packages in the right order is manual
• Sharing cached results between team members or CI runs is hard

Turborepo is a build system that understands the dependency graph of your monorepo. It caches task outputs (build artifacts, test results) and skips tasks whose inputs haven't changed. Cache hits are instant. Remote caching shares these cached results across your whole team and CI — so a build that took 10 minutes on one developer's machine is a cache hit for everyone else.

turbo.json — define your task pipeline

{
  "$schema": "https://turbo.build/schema.json",
  "tasks": {
    "build": {
      "dependsOn": ["^build"],
      "outputs": [".next/**", "dist/**"]
    },
    "test": {
      "dependsOn": ["^build"],
      "outputs": ["coverage/**"]
    },
    "lint": {
      "outputs": []
    },
    "dev": {
      "cache": false,
      "persistent": true
    }
  }
}

Run tasks across all packages

# Build everything (skips unchanged packages automatically)
npx turbo build

# Run tests only in packages that changed since last commit
npx turbo test --filter=[HEAD^1]

# Run multiple tasks in parallel
npx turbo build test lint

package.json scripts with turbo

{
  "scripts": {
    "build": "turbo run build",
    "dev": "turbo run dev",
    "test": "turbo run test",
    "lint": "turbo run lint"
  }
}

Enable remote caching (share cache with team + CI)

npx turbo login
npx turbo link
# Now CI builds use your team's shared cache — no redundant rebuilds