Turborepo Pipeline Visualizer

Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript monorepos, built by Vercel. It understands task dependencies across packages, caches build outputs locally and in the cloud, and runs tasks in parallel — dramatically speeding up build, test, and lint pipelines in large monorepos.

The pipeline (now called 'tasks' in Turbo v2+) in turbo.json defines how tasks relate to each other. Each entry specifies a task name, which tasks it depends on, what files it outputs, and whether results should be cached. Turborepo uses this graph to schedule tasks optimally across packages.

dependsOn tells Turborepo which tasks must complete before this task can start. Use '^build' (with caret) to mean 'the build task of all packages this package depends on'. Use 'test' (without caret) to mean 'the test task in the same package'. Plain task names (no caret) refer to tasks in the same workspace.

Turborepo hashes your source files, dependencies, and environment variables to create a unique fingerprint for each task. If the fingerprint matches a previous run, Turborepo replays the cached output instantly instead of re-running the task. With Remote Caching (Vercel), the cache is shared across your entire team and CI.

Persistent tasks are long-running tasks that never exit, like dev servers (next dev, vite dev). Mark them with 'persistent: true' so Turborepo knows they will not complete — it will not wait for them to finish before starting other tasks, and it will not cache their output.

Both are monorepo build orchestrators with caching. Turborepo is simpler and designed specifically for npm/pnpm/yarn workspaces — great for most web projects. Nx is more feature-rich with generators, a plugin ecosystem, and deeper IDE integration — better for very large enterprise monorepos or when you need code generation. Turborepo is easier to adopt; Nx scales further.