Install lerna with Homebrew, Nix

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• lerna

Project history

The Lerna documentation says the tool was created in the 2015/2016 era, before npm, Yarn, and pnpm had mature built-in workspace support. Early Lerna commands such as bootstrap, add, and link filled a gap by installing external dependencies and linking local packages inside a multi-package repository.

As package managers added first-class workspace support, Lerna's role narrowed. The project documentation explains that v7.0.0 removed bootstrap, add, and link by default in June 2023, and v9.0.0 fully removed those commands in September 2025 after more than two years of deprecation.

Adoption history

Lerna's own introduction describes it as used by tens of thousands of projects, including React and Jest. Its adoption grew with the npm-package monorepo pattern, where maintainers needed to publish multiple related packages with coordinated or independent versions.

In May 2022, Nrwl, the company behind Nx, announced that it was taking over stewardship of Lerna. That transition tied Lerna's later development to Nx's task-running and project-graph machinery while keeping Lerna's familiar versioning and publishing workflow.

How it is used

Typical use starts with a repository-level lerna.json and package.json workspace configuration. Lerna can run tasks across packages, detect changed packages, bump versions, create git tags, and publish selected packages to npm.

Modern Lerna expects package managers to handle dependency installation and local linking. Lerna's maintained value is concentrated in monorepo orchestration, project graph integration, versioning, and publishing.

Why package nerds care

Lerna is historically important because it made npm monorepos practical before workspaces became boring. Package maintainers cared because it encoded the release problem: many packages, linked locally, published separately, with changelogs and git tags that had to stay coherent.

Timeline

• 2015/2016: Lerna was created for JavaScript monorepos before package-manager workspaces were built in.
• 2022: Nrwl announced it was taking over stewardship of Lerna.
• 2023: Lerna v7.0.0 removed bootstrap, add, and link by default.
• 2025: Lerna v9.0.0 fully removed the legacy package-management commands.

Related projects

• Nx is the stewardship and build-system project closely associated with modern Lerna.
• npm, Yarn, and pnpm workspaces replaced Lerna's legacy package-linking commands.
• React and Jest are examples named by Lerna as projects that used it.

Sources

• https://lerna.js.org/docs/features/version-and-publish
• https://lerna.js.org/docs/introduction
• https://lerna.js.org/docs/legacy-package-management
• https://nx.dev/blog/lerna-is-dead-long-live-lerna