Docs: dependsOn is easy to use incorrectly and have tasks run out of order

[alex-page]

What is the improvement or update you wish to see?

It would be great to add an example for when to use ^build, build and the tradeoffs of this approach. This is a pattern we have noticed across many repositories turbo.json files.

Is there any context that might help us understand?

My current project set up:

• "turbo": "^1.13.2"
• "packageManager": "[email protected]

On a project I am working on we recently started using "test": { "dependsOn": ["^build"]}. It wasn't clear why the scripts were running out of order.

We noticed pnpm build would be running at the same time as pnpm test and some workspaces were waiting for other workspaces to complete building correctly but packages that depended on themselves to complete build did not wait and would run test at the same time.

Later we realised if added ^build, build it would run in order.

turbo.json

- "test": { "dependsOn": ["^build"]},
+ "test": { "dependsOn": ["^build", "build"]},

Does the docs page already exist? Please link to it.

https://turbo.build/repo/docs/reference/configuration#dependson

[anthonyshew]

I might be misunderstanding but the doc you've linked fairly succinctly describes your use case. Can you explain why it's confusing?

There's also a longer explanation with examples here: https://turbo.build/repo/docs/core-concepts/monorepos/task-dependencies#from-the-same-workspace

[alex-page]

We found the task dependency documentation but it would have been nice to have a reference to those details from the dependsOn configuration page. Searching dependsOn takes you to the configuration page.

The dependsOn example on the configuration page doesn't have any examples with both "^build", "build" and explain why this pattern would be helpful.