Python Tooling at Scale: LlamaIndex’s Monorepo Overhaul
11 comments
·May 21, 2025lyjackal
esafak
I use Github Actions triggers to pass flags to a monorepo dagger script to build and test the affected components. For example, if a commit touches the front- and back ends, rebuild both. If it only touches the front end, run integration tests using the latest backend without rebuilding it.
edit: spell out GHA
cheesyFish
Yea this definitely makes sense for smaller monorepos. For us, we ended up writing our own dependency graph parser to figure out what tests to run (which is easy enough with a single language like python honestly)
esafak
Was bazel an option?
chrisweekly
GHA - GitHub Actions, right?
cheesyFish
I agree! I hope uv introduces more tools for monorepos or refines the workspaces concept.
I saw workspaces require all dependencies to agree with eachother, which isn't quite possible in our repo
tuanacelik
So just to let me get this straight: Does this new setup aim to make it easier to contribute to llamaindex submodules specifically?
cheesyFish
Yes! For example, previously with pants, users would hit a lot of weird errors since how tests run with pants is different than running tests locally with pytest
We did not expect users to learn pants, but this often meant a lot of back and forth with maintainers to get PR tests working.
Should be much easier now!
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SlimIon729
Interesting to see LlamaIndex's journey from Poetry+Pants to uv+LlamaDev for managing their extensive monorepo. The speed improvements and better developer experience with `uv` are compelling. It's a good reminder of how tooling choices evolve with scale.
I recently did something similar. Using uv workspaces, I used the uv CLI's dependency graph to analyze the dependency tree then conditionally trigger CI workflows for affected projects. I wish there was a better way to access the uv dependency worktree other than parsing the `tree` like output