What's the difference between a Turbo app and a Turbo package?

[wujekbogdan]

Summary

I understand that the difference between an app and a package is that an app is a deployable unit (something we can wrap in a Docker container and deploy), while a package is just a library - a dependency shared between apps and other packages.

Up until now, I thought that placing one under an apps directory and the other in the packages directory was just a convention. However, for Turbo, there's no inherent distinction between these two, as they are all just npm/pnpm/yarn workspaces.

But I found two places in the documentation that indicate Turbo might apply some special treatment depending on whether it's an app or a regular package:

• The Package Types documentation mentions this distinction.
• The turbo gen command has a --type argument that accepts either app or package as a value.

Does this mean that Turbo makes some distinction between apps and packages, or is it just the documentation that's misleading and the --type argument accepts any value that is simply a workspace name?

Additional information

No response

Example

No response

[anthonyshew]

You're correct that this is only a convention. Turborepo carries no distinction on these directories.

turbo gen does leverage those conventions. However, it's more likely that we should find a way for turbo gen to not have this behavior.