Nx (monorepo)
By Nrwl
Nx is an open-source build system and set of developer tools for managing monorepos, best known in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, offering smart caching, task orchestration, and code generation.
Definition
Nx is an open-source build system and set of developer tools for managing monorepos, best known in the JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystem, offering smart caching, task orchestration, and code generation.
Overview
Nx grew out of Nrwl's consulting work helping enterprise Angular teams manage large codebases, and it has since expanded well beyond Angular to support React, Node.js, Next.js, and other JavaScript frameworks, alongside limited multi-language support. Its core value is making a monorepo — a single repository holding many applications and shared libraries — practical at scale: Nx builds a dependency graph of every project in the workspace and only rebuilds, retests, or relints the projects actually affected by a given change, rather than running every task across the whole repo. Nx's computation caching, both local and via its optional Nx Cloud service, means a task that has already run with identical inputs elsewhere — even on a teammate's machine or in CI — can be replayed instantly from cache instead of re-executed, which can cut CI times dramatically on large monorepos. Nx also ships generators and executors, code-generation and task-running plugins that scaffold new applications, libraries, and components following consistent, opinionated conventions across a team. Compared to Bazel, Nx is far more approachable for teams already working in the JavaScript ecosystem, integrating naturally with existing tools like ESLint, Jest, and Webpack rather than requiring a wholesale switch to a new build language. It occupies similar territory to Rush.js and Buck2 but leans more heavily into developer experience, plugin ecosystem, and framework-specific tooling than either.
Key Features
- Dependency-graph-aware task running that only touches affected projects
- Local and distributed computation caching, including via Nx Cloud
- Generators and executors for scaffolding consistent code across a workspace
- Deep integration with popular JavaScript tooling like ESLint, Jest, and Webpack
- Project graph visualization for understanding cross-project dependencies
- Support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and a growing set of other languages
- Distributed task execution across CI agents for large workspaces
- Framework-specific plugins for Angular, React, Next.js, and Node.js
Use Cases
Alternatives
History
Nx is a build system and monorepo tool for JavaScript/TypeScript projects, created by Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin, former Google engineers who had worked together on the Angular team. After leaving Google in 2016 they founded the consultancy Nrwl and, in 2017, released the first version of Nx to bring Google-style monorepo workflows — a single repository with shared tooling, dependency-graph awareness, and heavily cached, incremental builds — to teams outside of big tech. Nx computes which projects a change actually affects so it can run only the necessary builds and tests, and its plugin ecosystem supports many frameworks. It grew into one of the most widely adopted monorepo platforms in the JavaScript world.
Sources
- Nx — "Who we are" (company) · as of 2026-07-17
- Nx on GitHub — nrwl/nx · as of 2026-07-17