Nx

Nx is an open-source build system with tooling and continuous integration (CI) capabilities that helps developer teams maintain and scale monorepo. The software is developed and maintained by Nrwl, a company that also offers a fully managed product, Nx Cloud. Nx is built with Rust and Typescript. The software is used by over 2 million developers and 50% of Fortune 500 companies.

Nx's tools and techniques aim to enhance developer productivity and CI performance and maintain code quality. The following are core features provided by Nx:

• Tasks are run in parallel, and tasks are ordered based on dependencies between them.
• Local and remote caching prevent unnecessary re-runs of tasks.
• Nx plugins provide code generation and tools to automatically upgrade the codebase and its dependencies.
• Nx is customizable by creating plugins that can be shared with the community.

Nx was built to help developers configure, maintain, and integrate various tools and frameworks. It provides a system that works well for a small team of developers while scaling up to an entire organization. Nx aims to speed up computation (builds, tests, etc.) locally and on CI and integrate and automate tooling via plugins. Nx users can quickly scaffold a new project without having to configure lower-level build tools. Nx is built in a modular fashion so users can adopt incrementally and only utilize the features they need.

Diagram showing How Nx fits into the user's workspace.

Nx provides technology-agnostic capabilities, including workspace analysis, task running, caching, distribution, code generation, and automated code migrations. Plugins are NPM (package manager for JavaScript) packages built on top of the fundamental capabilities provided by Nx. They contain code generators, executors (to abstract lower-level build tooling), and automated code migrations for keeping tools up to date. While the Nx package works the same with both JavaScript and non-JavaScript projects, plugins are typically technology-specific. Nx maintains plugins for React, Next, Remix, Angular, Jest, Cypress, Storybook, and more. The Devkit is a set of utilities for building Nx plugins. Nx Cloud helps scale projects on CI by adding remote caching and distributed task execution. It also improves developer ergonomics by integrating with GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket and providing searchable structured logs. Nx Console is an extension for VSCode, IntelliJ, and VIM. It provides code autocompletion, interactive generators, workspace visualizations, powerful refactorings, and more.