Smart Monorepo

Nx offers many features, but at its core, it is a task runner. Out of the box, it can cache your tasks and ensure those tasks are run in the correct order. After the initial set up, you can incrementally add on other features that would be helpful in your organization.

Add Nx

Nx is a build system with built in tooling and advanced CI capabilities. It helps you maintain and scale monorepos, both locally and on CI. We will explore the features of Nx in this tutorial by adding it to the Gradle workspace above.

To add Nx, run

npx nx@latest init

This command will download the latest version of Nx and help set up your repository to take advantage of it. Nx will also detect Gradle is used in the repo so it will propose adding the @nx/gradle plugin to integrate Gradle with Nx. Select the plugin and continue with the setup.

Similar to Gradle, Nx can be run with the nx or nx.bat executables. We will learn about some of the Nx commands in the following sections.