lerna init

Create a new Lerna repo or add Lerna to an existing repo

Install lerna for access to the lerna CLI.

Usage

$ lerna init

Create a new Lerna repo or add Lerna to an existing repo.

When run, this command will:

1. Add lerna as a devDependency in package.json if it doesn't already exist.
2. Create a lerna.json config file.
3. Generate a .gitignore file if one doesn't already exist.
4. Initialize a git repository if one doesn't already exist.
5. Install dependencies with the detected package manager.

Example output on a new git repo:

$ lerna init
lerna info version v7.1.4
lerna info Applying the following file system updates:
CREATE lerna.json
CREATE package.json
CREATE .gitignore
lerna info Initializing Git repository
lerna info Using npm to install packages
lerna success Initialized Lerna files
lerna info New to Lerna? Check out the docs: https://lerna.js.org/docs/getting-started

Lerna will automatically determine a package manager to use based on the presence of yarn.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml, or package-lock.json files or by matching the path of the executed binary (e.g., yarn dlx, pnpx, npx). If none of these are detected, Lerna will default to npm.

Options

--dry-run

$ lerna init --dry-run

Preview the changes that will be made to the file system without actually modifying anything.

--independent

$ lerna init --independent

This flag tells Lerna to use independent versioning mode. See Version and Publish for details.

--packages

$ lerna init --packages="packages/*"
$ lerna init --packages="packages/*" --packages="components/*"

Set the packages globs used to find packages in the repo. If not specified, then Lerna will use package manager workspaces to detect packages.

NOTE: if you are initializing Lerna in an existing repo, you will need to either enable package manager workspaces OR provide the --packages argument.

--skip-install

Skip running npm/yarn/pnpm install after initializing Lerna in the repo.

Deprecated Options

--exact

$ lerna init --exact

By default, lerna init will use a caret range when adding or updating the local version of lerna, just like npm install --save-dev lerna.

To retain the lerna 1.x behavior of "exact" comparison, pass this flag. It will configure lerna.json to enforce exact match for all subsequent executions.

{
  "command": {
    "init": {
      "exact": true
    }
  },
  "version": "0.0.0"
}

--exact is deprecated because lerna init should no longer be run on an existing Lerna repo.