Workspaces

Details about how to use Volta within a workspace environment, where there are multiple projects in a single repo and they all want to share Volta settings.

Extending the Configuration

Within the "volta" section in package.json, you can specify an entry with key "extends". The value of that entry should be a path to another JSON file which also has a "volta" section. Relative paths will be resolved relative to the file in which they are set. Any Volta settings (e.g. "node" or "yarn" versions) will be merged with those from the file pointed to by "extends", with precedence given to the current file. So if you want to have a single Node version for all your projects, you would set those versions at the root, and then each project would need only "extends": "../path/to/root/package.json".

Examples

Given the following folder structure and package.json contents:

.
├── package.json
└── packages
    ├── cli
    │   └── package.json
    └── utils
        └── package.json

• package.json

    {
      "volta": {
        "node": "12.16.1",
        "yarn": "1.22.4"
      }
    }
  

• packages/cli/package.json

    {
      "volta": {
        "extends": "../../package.json"
      }
    }
  

• packages/utils/package.json

    {
      "volta": {
        "extends": "../../package.json"
      }
    }
  

Running node anywhere in the workspace would cause you to use Node 12.16.1. And if you update that version in the root package.json, it will automatically be used in all of the projects, without having to duplicate the settings in each subproject.

Pinning Tools

When you run volta pin to select a version of a tool within a workspace, Volta will always add those settings to the closest package.json that it finds. So, in the above example, if you ran volta pin node@14 within the packages/utils subproject, the new version of Node will be written into packages/utils/package.json and will only apply to the utils subproject, not to any of the others. This allows you to easily customize the tool versions on a per-project basis.

If you wish to use volta pin to make a change to the root configuration, first cd into the workspace root and then run volta pin from there.

Hooks

If your project uses project hooks, you can place them either in a .volta directory in a subproject or in a .volta directory in the root. Volta will look for hooks in each location pointed to by an "extends" key, so that the settings can be customized at whatever level is needed.

Project-local Binaries

In addition to looking for hooks at each level, Volta will also look at each level to detect project-local dependencies to use when running a 3rd-party tool. It will attempt to find it in node_modules/.bin relative to each file referenced by "extends".