Create Your Own Plugin

Nx is like the VSCode of build tools. The core of Nx enables project and task graph creation and analysis, orchestration and execution of tasks, computation caching, and code generation. Nx plugins extend this functionality and are built on top of the underlying Nx Devkit.

Plugins are optional

Many organizations use Nx without any plugins. If you are mainly interested in making your workspace faster or enabling distributed task execution, then plugins aren't necessary.

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Nx plugins

Nx plugins are npm packages that contain generators and executors to extend the capabilities of an Nx workspace.

Plugins have:

  • Generators

    • Generators automate making changes to the file system.
    • Anytime you run nx generate ..., you invoke a generator.
    • They are used to create/update applications, libraries, components, and more.

  • Executors

    • Executors define how to perform an action on a project.
    • You invoke an executor with nx run ... (or nx test, nx build).
    • They are used to build applications and libraries, test them, lint them, and more.

  • Project Graph Extensions

    • Plugins can provide a function processProjectGraph to add extra edges to the project graph.
    • This allows plugins to influence the behavior of nx affected and the project graph visualization.
    • See project graph plugins for more information.

  • Project Inference Extensions

    • Plugins can provide an array of glob patterns, projectFilePatterns that are used to infer project information.
    • Plugins can provide a function registerProjectTargets that takes in one of the matched project files, and returns an object containing inferred targets from the file.
    • This allows plugins to add new projects to the workspace that aren't identified by project.json or package.json files, and infer extra targets without adding them into project configuration.

All the core plugins are written using Nx Devkit, and you can use the same utilities to write your own generators and executors.

Plugins!

The Nx team maintains a core set of plugins for many application and tooling frameworks. You can write custom generators and executors for your own workspace. You can also write your own plugin and share it with the community. The Nx Plugin plugin provides guidance on how you can build your own custom plugins.

Local workspace plugins

Nx plugins can also be used in the workspace they are generated inside of. For example, if you generate a plugin with nx g @nrwl/nx-plugin:plugin my-plugin --importPath @my-org/my-plugin, you will be able to immediately make use of generators and executors within it. This would look like nx g @my-org/my-plugin:lib for generators or "executor": "@my-org/my-plugin:build" for executors.

If you are only planning on making use of generators, Nx provides workspace generators which can be used rather than whole plugins.

Generating a full plugin allows you to take advantage of all of the capabilities above, including project inference and graph extension, which is not possible when solely using workspace generators.

Additionally, your local plugin could be set as the default collection in nx.json, such that running nx g lib would call your workspace plugin's lib generator.

Listing Nx plugins

Nx provides a list of installed and available plugins from Nrwl and community maintainers. Plugins maintained by Nrwl maintained are scoped under the @nrwl organization.

Use the nx list command to display all registered plugins.

Using the nx list [plugin] command displays the generators and executors provided by that package.

Nx Devkit

The Nx Devkit is the underlying technology used to customize Nx to support different technologies and custom use-cases. It contains many utility functions for reading and writing files, updating configuration, working with Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), and more.

Pay as you go

As with most things in Nx, the core of Nx Devkit is very simple. It only uses language primitives and immutable objects (the tree being the only exception). See Simplest Generator and Simplest Executor for examples on creating generators and executors. The Using Executors and Using Generators guides also have additional information on executors and generators.

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