What is Rush Stack?

Rush Stack is a...

Mission to provide reusable tech for running large scale monorepos for the web
Open collaboration among community partners with serious tooling requirements, who got tired of going it alone
Specific strategy that integrates popular tools like Node.js, TypeScript, ESLint, Prettier, Webpack, Jest, etc.
Family of projects that fill in the gaps for this strategy

Although various pieces of this work have been underway for years, we're now bringing them together under a common charter as Rush Stack. Track our progress on the News page.

What's in the stack?

These major tools are developed under the Rush Stack umbrella:

Rush: the scalable monorepo build orchestrator
Heft: an extensible build system that interfaces with Rush
API Extractor: coordinates API reviews for library packages, and generates .d.ts rollups
API Documenter: generates your API documentation website
@rushstack/eslint-bulk: enables you to roll out new lint rules in your monorepo without having to clutter up source files with thousands of machine-generated // eslint-ignore-next-line directives
@rushstack/eslint-config: our standardized ESLint rule set, specifically designed for large scale TypeScript monorepos
@rushstack/eslint-patch: a patch that enhances ESLint with better support for large scale monorepos
@rushstack/eslint-plugin-packlets: "Packlets" are a lightweight alternative to NPM packages for organizing source files within a single project
Lockfile Explorer: helps you investigate and solve version conflicts when working in a Rush monorepo
Rundown: a tool for optimizing Node.js process startup times
@rushstack/trace-import: Our command-line tool for troubleshooting how modules are resolved by import and require()

The projects are built on a common framework of reusable library packages, which includes:

ts-command-line: a strict command-line parser whose options/docs can be augmented by toolchain packages with built-in support for tab-completion on PowerShell and Bash
node-core-library: the core framework used by all our projects
package-deps-hash: the incremental build engine used by Rush
rig-package: a system for sharing tool configurations between projects without duplicating config files
stream-collator: the magic behind how Rush can display real-time log output from concurrent tasks, without ugly interleaving of the output
tree-pattern: a pattern matcher for JavaScript tree structures, used by our lint rules
a family of webpack plugins useful for building web applications

What's the relationship to Rush?

The "Rush Stack" components are optional extras that you can use with Rush.

As a build orchestrator, Rush's job is to:

Ensure deterministic and reliable package installations (using Yarn, PNPM, or NPM)
Build your projects in the right order, as fast as possible
Apply policies to keep your monorepo running smoothly
Manage your publishing workflows
Establish a standard repo layout and familiar CLI, to facilitate developers who contribute to many different monorepos

Beyond this role, Rush leaves the rest up to you. Individual projects can build with any tool chain you like. This is very flexible!

But flexibility has its downsides. Node.js tooling is notorious for its bewildering array of options: Choose your compiler. Choose your linter. Choose your bundler, your package manager, your task engine, test runner, test assertion library, and so on. Once you've placed your bets, integrating all these pieces turns out to be a software project of its own. As you scale up, these costs can add up fast!

In summer of 2019, we launched Rush Stack with the aim to provide a reusable solution for this broader set of problems. You can still use Rush by itself, of course. But if you're tired of going it alone, we invite you to:

Trade your flexibility for an opinionated approach backed by tooling experts who run huge monorepos
Join forces with the open community that's investing in this approach
Help us to "go deep" with integrations, optimizations, documentation, and polish to achieve a world class developer experience