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🧐 Nx Workspace Scope

  • Nx started as an extension of the Angular CLI. It is now a technology-agnostic build platform with robust support for a wide range of frontend and backend technologies through its plugin ecosystem.

Nx is primarily designed for monorepos, but it's not exclusively a monorepo tool.

  • Default Use Case: Monorepo: Nx is famous for its sophisticated tooling to manage monorepos—a single repository containing multiple applications and shared libraries. This is where its features like shared tooling, code sharing, and dependency tracking really shine, aligning well with the need for atomic changes across applications in your consultancy projects.
  • Single-Project Support: You can also use Nx to create a single-project workspace (a non-monorepo structure) to leverage its powerful tooling, such as its smart build system and code generation features, even if you only have one application.
  • Nx Cloud (Free Tier): Use Nx Cloud's Remote Caching. When Developer A runs tests on their laptop, the results are cached in the cloud. When they push to GitHub, the CI sees the cache and skips the tests, costing you 0 minutes. Why this helps you: Nx will create an nx.json that handles Task Caching. If your code hasn't changed, Nx will replay the last test result instead of spinning up the CPU, which is your primary defense for the GitHub Actions free tier.

🛠️ Build System​

Nx Core is a Rust-based, technology-agnostic task runner that forms the foundation of its build system. It goes beyond simple task execution by adding intelligence to your development pipeline:

  • Smart Caching: Nx implements a sophisticated local and remote computation cache. This means it only runs builds, tests, or lints for projects where the inputs (source code, dependencies, config) have changed, drastically speeding up your development and Continuous Integration (CI) cycles.
  • Affected Commands: It intelligently analyzes the project graph and your code changes to determine which projects are "affected" by a commit. This allows you to run commands like nx affected:test to only execute tests for the necessary projects, which is a major accelerator for a fast-paced solo developer workflow.
  • Consistent Execution: It provides a unified way (Executors and Generators) to build, test, and serve projects regardless of their underlying technology, promoting consistency which is key for maintaining high code quality across multiple client projects.

Install​

yarn global add @nrwl/cli

add nx to existing project​

  1. npx nx migrate 17.0.0

ng update vs nx migrate​