How we shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size by 94%
This isn't click bait. We really did this! We work in a very large Javascript monorepo at Microsoft we colloquially call 1JS. It's large not only in terms of GB, but also in terms of sheer volume of code and contributions. We recently crossed the 1,000 monthly active users mark, about 2,500 packages, and ~20million lines of code! The most recent clone I did of the repo clocked in at an astonishing 178GB.
When I first joined the repo a few years ago, I noticed after a few months that it was growing, when I first cloned it was a gig or 2, but after a few months was already at around 4gb. It was hard to know exactly why.
Back then I ran a tool called git-sizer , and it told me a few things about some blobs that were large. Large blobs happens when someone accidentally checks in some binary, so, not much you can do there other than enforce size limits on check ins which is a feature of Azure DevOps. Retroactively, once the file is there though, it's semi stuck in history.
Secondly, it flagged me about our Beachball change files, which we weren't deleting. We use them in the same way that Changesets work, accomplishing similar goals as semantic-release where we want to tell the packages how to automatically bump their semver ranges.
