Turborepo is a high-performance build system for JavaScript and TypeScript codebases that accelerates monorepo workflows through intelligent caching, parallel task execution, and dependency-aware orchestration. Built in Rust and maintained by Vercel, Turborepo analyzes your workspace's package graph—the structural relationships between applications and libraries—and overlays a task graph defining how commands like build, test, and lint should execute across packages. The critical insight is that Turborepo restores task results from a content-based fingerprint instead of re-executing work, enabling local caches to skip unchanged tasks entirely and remote caches to share artifacts across team members and CI pipelines. For teams scaling beyond 3-5 packages, Turborepo transforms full-repo builds from 20+ minutes to under 5 minutes through parallelism and near-instant cache hits, making it the most approachable entry point to professional monorepo management without requiring framework-specific scaffolding or complex configuration.
What This Cheat Sheet Covers
This topic spans 22 focused tables and 142 indexed concepts. Below is a complete table-by-table outline of this topic, spanning foundational concepts through advanced details.
Table 1: Installation and Getting Started
Whether you're starting fresh or bolting Turborepo onto an existing repo, these commands get you to a working setup. create-turbo scaffolds a full starter, turbo init retrofits an existing monorepo by reading its structure, and the login/link pair connects you to Vercel's remote cache once you're ready to share build artifacts across machines.
| Command | Example | Description |
|---|---|---|
npx create-turbo@latest | • Scaffolds new Turborepo with starter template including apps and packages • prompts for package manager selection (pnpm, npm, yarn, bun). | |
npx create-turbo@latest --example basic | • Creates repo from specific example template • options include basic, with-docker, design-system. | |
cd existing-monorepo && npx turbo init | • Adds Turborepo to existing monorepo • generates initial turbo.json by analyzing workspace structure | |
npm install turbo --global | • Installs global turbo CLI for faster command execution • avoids npx overhead for local development workflows |