Is it possible to have a standalone Cypress test repository, separate from the front end application?

1. Is it possible to have a standalone Cypress test repository, separate from the front end application? The reason behind this is that our website itself has different components which are placed in separate Github repositories. I would want to write Cypress tests for the entire website. Although I could write tests specific to repo, I would imagine having to rewrite helpers etc. which leads to my second question.
2. Is it possible to share helpers across repositories or have a centralized repository for some helpers which I could reuse across projects. There might be a better way to do this which I'm unaware of.