Whether you have a single application or a suite of applications, code reuse, standards around structure, process, and feature development help to ensure your codebase remains healthy in the long term.
Nx is a build framework for monorepos with first-class React support. It helps accelerate the adoption of proven development practices across projects of many sizes and scopes. Nx provides additional tooling for React projects to help scale and develop features at a faster pace.
This guide walks through some of the tooling provided by Nx, the creation, and structure of an Nx workspace, with an example to follow along with.
What are Monorepos
A monorepo is a single collection of all your source code that spans multiple applications, libraries, and languages. Everything in the monorepo is not deployed at the same time but is all located in a central repository. Many companies use monorepos for different organizations and projects. Some even use a single monorepo to house all the source code for projects across their entire company.
Here are some of the benefits of a monorepo:
- Shared code — Promotes reuse of validation code, UI components, and types across the code base, including code between the backend and the frontend.
- Atomic changes — Make changes to a server API and modify the clients that consume that API in the same commit. No more coordinating commits across different repositories.
- Developer mobility — Provides consistency between building and testing applications written using different tools and technologies. Developers can confidently contribute to other teams’ applications and verify that their changes are safe.
- A single set of dependencies — Use a single version of third-party dependencies for all your apps. Less frequently used applications don’t get left behind with a 3-year-old version of a framework library or an old version of a build tool.
There are also a few common misconceptions with monorepos:
- Strictly co-locating your code just by placing all your code in the same repository.
- Running all the builds, tests, and quality checks on all applications for each PR or commit.
- Deploying every application on every commit to the main branch.
- Setting up multiple scripts across applications to handle common tasks.
Just because you have all your code in a monorepo, that does not mean you have run all the tests and checks on your monorepo for every single commit. This doesn't scale well and leads to bottlenecks in your development and Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipelines. Nx provides integrated tooling to intelligently determine what needs to be run through code analysis, affected commands, and computation caching.
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