Migrating from Turborepo monorepo - looking for best practices with vp run

[nikolailehbrink]

We just tried migrating a large monorepo (tRPC + NestJS backend, React + Vite frontend, shared packages) from Turborepo + Vitest + Oxlint + Prettier + Husky + lint-staged to Vite+. The migration went well overall, but we ran into a few gaps compared to Turborepo's task runner and want to make sure we're not missing something.

1. Parallel/persistent dev tasks

In Turborepo we had:

"dev": {
  "cache": false,
  "persistent": true,
  "env": ["*"]
}

This ran all dev servers (client, backend, shared types) concurrently and kept them alive. With vp run dev --filter client --filter backend --filter apiTypes, tasks run in topological order — the first long-running watch process blocks the others from starting.

Our workaround: Fall back to pnpm --parallel --filter client --filter backend --filter apiTypes run dev for the dev script.

Question: Is there a vp run equivalent for concurrent/persistent tasks? Something like --parallel or a persistent: true task config? Or is pnpm --parallel the intended approach here?

2. Implicit recursive execution

Turborepo's turbo run build ran across all workspace packages by default. vp run build only runs in the current package — you need -r for recursive. We initially missed this and got silent 0-task runs.

Question: Is this by design? Would a recursive: true default in vite.config.ts task config make sense, or is explicit -r the intended UX?

3. vp test vs vp run test in monorepos

vp test (built-in Vitest) from the workspace root runs all test files with a single vitest process — ignoring per-package vitest configs (different environments, setup files, etc.). This caused failures because backend tests need env var mocking and client tests need jsdom.

vp run test:unit -r works correctly by delegating to each package's own test script.

Question: Is there a recommended way to make vp test work from the monorepo root while respecting per-package vitest configs? Or is vp run test -r the intended pattern for monorepos?

4. turbo prune --docker

Turborepo's turbo prune --docker creates a minimal subset of the monorepo for Docker layer caching. We couldn't find a vp equivalent, so we kept turbo installed solely in the Docker pruner stage.

Question: Is there a vp equivalent planned, or is the recommendation to keep using turbo prune / pnpm deploy / manual COPY for Docker builds?

5. Adding dependsOn/env to existing package.json scripts

In Turborepo, turbo.json let us add dependsOn, env, and cache config to any package.json script by name — without modifying the script itself. In Vite+, these features only work on tasks defined in vite.config.ts, and task names cannot overlap with package.json script names.

This means to add dependsOn: ["^build"] or env: ["CDN_BASE_URL"] to our existing build script, we'd have to remove it from package.json and redefine it as a task with an explicit command field — which is more disruptive.

Question: Is there a way to annotate/extend package.json scripts with dependsOn/env/cache config without converting them to tasks? Or is the migration path to move scripts into vite.config.ts tasks over time

[fengmk2]

cc @branchseer

[danieljvdm]

I'll add to this: is there a plan to make a TUI for the persistent task runners? In Turborepo, you can run n tasks at the same time and it gives you a nice TUI to swap between the logs of each.