What is nx?
The nx npm package is a suite of powerful, extensible dev tools to help you architect, test, build, and develop your software projects. It is particularly well-suited for monorepo development, where multiple projects coexist in a single repository. Nx provides tools for project scaffolding, dependency graph analysis, affected change analysis, and more.
What are nx's main functionalities?
Project Scaffolding
This command sets up a new workspace. Nx supports many presets to scaffold applications using various frameworks like Angular, React, or Node.js.
npx create-nx-workspace@latest myworkspace
Generating Components
Generates a new component within a specified project in the workspace. This helps maintain consistency and follows best practices.
nx generate component my-component --project=my-app
Running Tasks
Executes a specific task, such as building a project. Nx uses an executor to run tasks which can be configured for different environments.
nx run my-app:build
Affected Change Analysis
Determines which apps and libs are affected by changes to the current git branch, and performs the build task only for those.
nx affected:build
Dependency Graph
Visualizes the dependency graph of the workspace, showing how projects depend on one another. This is useful for understanding the structure and ensuring that changes do not have unintended consequences.
nx dep-graph
Other packages similar to nx
lerna
Lerna is a tool for managing JavaScript projects with multiple packages, optimizing the workflow around managing multi-package repositories with git and npm. Compared to Nx, Lerna focuses more on the versioning and publishing of multi-package repositories, whereas Nx provides a broader range of tools for development and build optimization.
Nx CLI
What is Nx?
🔎 Extensible Dev Tools for Monorepos.
Nx Helps You
Develop like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft
Nx helps scale your development from one team building one application to many teams building multiple frontend and backend applications all in the same workspace. When using Nx, developers have a holistic dev experience powered by an advanced CLI (with editor plugins), capabilities for controlled code sharing and consistent code generation.
Use Intelligent Build System with Distributed Caching
Nx is smart. It analyzes your workspace and figures out what can be affected by every code change. That's why Nx doesn't rebuild and retest everything on every commit--it only rebuilds what is necessary.
Nx also uses a distributed computation cache. If someone has already built or tested similar code, Nx will use their results to speed up the command for everyone else instead of rebuilding or retesting the code from scratch. This, in combination with Nx’s support for distributed and incremental builds, can help teams see up to 10x reduction in build and test times.
Use Modern Tools
Nx is an open platform with plugins for many modern tools and frameworks. It has support for TypeScript, React, Angular, Cypress, Jest, Prettier, Nest.js, Next.js, Storybook, Ionic among others. With Nx, you get a consistent dev experience regardless of the tools used.
Getting Started
Creating an Nx Workspace
Using npx
npx create-nx-workspace
Using npm init
npm init nx-workspace
Using yarn create
yarn create nx-workspace
The create-nx-workspace
command will ask you to select a preset, which will configure some plugins and create your applications to help you get started.
? What to create in the new workspace (Use arrow keys)
❯ empty [an empty workspace with a layout that works best for building apps]
oss [an empty workspace with a layout that works best for open-source projects]
web components [a workspace with a single app built using web components]
angular [a workspace with a single Angular application]
angular-nest [a workspace with a full stack application (Angular + Nest)]
react [a workspace with a single React application]
react-express [a workspace with a full stack application (React + Express)]
next.js [a workspace with a single Next.js application]
Select the preset that works best for you.
Serving Application
- Run
nx serve myapp
to serve the newly generated application! - Run
nx test myapp
to test it. - Run
nx e2e myapp-e2e
to run e2e tests for it.
Documentation
Courses
Scale React Development with Nx | Nx Workspaces | Advanced Nx Workspaces |
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Nx Demo & Tutorial Videos
Books and Blogs
Additional Resources