Polylith
Polylith is a software architecture that applies functional thinking at the system scale. It helps us build simple, maintainable, testable, and scalable backend systems.
Working with Polylith is like having a box with LEGO® bricks:
From here we put together sets of bricks, that are built into services and tools:
We work with all the code from one place, and get all the benefits we have from a monolith:
This gives us a joyful development experience and a high degree of flexibility in how to run the code in production.
If you want to quickly see if Polylith is for you, please jump to the Sharing code page. Another good start could be to read this blog post that explains Polylith through the lens of the Hexagonal architecture.
There are several ways of learning Polylith:
If you prefer some other language, you can still structure your code as a Polylith workspace and get benefits like decoupled components, a single development environment, and a flexible deployment situation.
Go and have a look at these systems:
Get a high level introduction to Polylith with these two videos:
10-minute overview, by James Trunk
A 39 minutes overview of the Polylith architecture, by Joakim Tengstrand and Furkan Bayraktar
- The origin of complexity - The foundational concepts that Polylith is built upon, by Joakim Tengstrand
If you prefer reading documentation, then you’re already in exactly the right place!
Note that Polylith documentation is split into two parts:
- 1.This high-level documentation, which describes how Polylith works and the problems it solves. It tries to remain language agnostic, but does use Clojure in the code examples.
- 2.
Content:
- Polylith - what is Polylith?
- Sharing code - how Polylith addresses the sharing problem
- Testing incrementally - how a Polylith system can be tested incrementally
- Polylith in a nutshell - a walkthrough of the building blocks of Polylith.
- Workspace - were we put everything.
- Component - our composable building block (brick).
- Base - building block (brick) that exposes a public API
- Project - deployable artifact made of a set of bricks
- Development project - the place where we work with all our bricks
- Bring it all together - a short example
- Simplicity - how Polylith simplifies the design
- poly tool - overview of the poly tool
- Current architectures - a walk through of common architectures
- Advantages of Polylith - how Polylith differ from other architectures
- Transitioning to Polylith - step by step guide on how to transition to Polylith
- Production systems - list of companies using Polylith in production
- Why the name "Polylith"?
- Videos
- FAQ - Frequently Asked Questions
- Who made this?
Polylith is a software architecture that solves some of the fundamental challenges in building backend systems. Those challenges are:
- It's difficult to share our code across teams and services
- We lack a shared language for communicating architectural concepts
- As our codebases grow, they tend to become a complex mess that is hard to change and test
- We try to mimic our complex production environments in our development environment
- Our systems take too long to test, build, and deploy
Polylith addresses these challenges by introducing simple, composable, LEGO-like bricks, which can easily be shared across teams and services. The choice of bricks determines what each artifact does and how it's exposed.
To make the development experience even more delightful, we've also built a tool which gives instant creation of the various building blocks, incremental tests (only test the code that's impacted by the last changes), and project visualization.
- Polylith isn't a framework and does not come with ready to use functionality.
- Polylith isn't a library.
- Polylith isn't a tool (but has tooling support for Clojure and Python).
Polylith is language agnostic, and it should be possible to use it in almost any programming language. We in the Polylith team have only used it with the functional language Clojure so far, but there is nothing stopping someone from using it in a procedural language like C, or an object oriented language like Java (remember that we have tooling support for Python already). Even without tooling support, you will get most of the benefits.
Last modified 26d ago