Lockfile-aware deployment skipping for monorepos
By Steven Van ·
Vercel now inspects the lockfile itself, so monorepo apps whose dependencies are unchanged skip their builds, for GitHub-connected projects.
Vercel now checks what changed inside a monorepo's lockfile instead of treating any lockfile edit as a reason to redeploy everything. Before this, a lockfile change was a shared input, so every application in the repository was rebuilt. Vercel now maps the lockfile's dependencies to individual applications and deploys only those whose dependencies were updated.
The feature is based on Turborepo's lockfile analysis and supports the package managers listed as stable in Turborepo's Support Policy. Vercel says the aim is to reduce queue times further. Skipped builds do not use concurrent build slots, unlike the Ignored Build Step. The monorepo documentation sets out the requirements:
- The project must be connected to a GitHub repository.
- The monorepo must use npm, yarn, pnpm or Bun workspaces, with every package listed in the workspace definition and given a unique name.
- Dependencies between workspace packages must be declared in each package's package.json.
A project that does not meet these requirements can still use the Ignored Build Step. Skipping can be turned off with the Skip deployment switch under Root Directory in the project's Build and Deployment settings.