Manage Releases

If you decide to publish the animals or names packages on NPM, Nx can also help you manage the release process. Release management involves updating the version of your package, populating a changelog, and publishing the new version to the NPM registry.

First you’ll need to define which projects Nx should manage releases for by setting the release.projects property in nx.json:

{
  "release": {
    "projects": ["packages/*"]
  }
}

Now you’re ready to use the nx release command to publish the animals and names packages. The first time you run nx release, you need to add the --first-release flag so that Nx doesn’t try to find the previous version to compare against. It’s also recommended to use the --dry-run flag until you’re sure about the results of the nx release command, then you can run it a final time without the --dry-run flag.

To preview your first release, run:

nx release --first-release --dry-run

The command will ask you a series of questions and then show you what the results would be. Once you are happy with the results, run it again without the --dry-run flag:

nx release --first-release

After this first release, you can remove the --first-release flag and just run nx release --dry-run. There is also a dedicated feature page that goes into more detail about how to use the nx release command.