Gradle / Smart Monorepo / Run Tasks

Run Tasks

Nx is a task runner built for monorepos. It can run a single task for a single project, a task for all projects, and even intelligently run a subset of tasks based on the changes you’ve made in your repository. Nx also has sophisticated computation caching to reuse the results of tasks. We will explore how Nx adds to the task running Gradle provides.

Before we start running tasks, let’s explore the tasks available for the application project. The @nx/gradle plugin that we’ve installed reflects Gradle’s tasks to Nx, which allows it to run any of the Gradle tasks defined for that project. You can view the available tasks either through Nx Console or from the terminal:

./nx show project application --web

The Nx command to run the build task for the application project is:

./nx run application:build

When Nx runs a Gradle task, it hands off the execution of that task to Gradle, so all task dependencies and configuration settings in the Gradle configuration are still respected.

By running the task via Nx, however, the task computation was cached for reuse. Now, running ./nx run application:build again, will complete almost instantly as the result from the previous execution will be used.

./nx run application:build

   ✔  1/1 dependent project tasks succeeded [1 read from cache]

   Hint: you can run the command with --verbose to see the full dependent project outputs

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> nx run application:classes  [existing outputs match the cache, left as is]

> ./gradlew :application:classes

> Task :library:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
> Task :library:processResources NO-SOURCE
> Task :library:classes UP-TO-DATE
> Task :library:jar UP-TO-DATE
> Task :application:compileJava UP-TO-DATE
> Task :application:processResources UP-TO-DATE
> Task :application:classes UP-TO-DATE

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 647ms
4 actionable tasks: 4 up-to-date

> nx run application:build  [existing outputs match the cache, left as is]

> ./gradlew :application:build


Deprecated Gradle features were used in this build, making it incompatible with Gradle 9.0.

You can use '--warning-mode all' to show the individual deprecation warnings and determine if they come from your own scripts or plugins.

For more on this, please refer to https://docs.gradle.org/8.5/userguide/command_line_interface.html#sec:command_line_warnings in the Gradle documentation.

BUILD SUCCESSFUL in 768ms
9 actionable tasks: 1 executed, 8 up-to-date

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 NX   Successfully ran target build for project application and 3 tasks it depends on (30ms)

Nx read the output from the cache instead of running the command for 4 out of 4 tasks.

Now that we’ve run one task, let’s run all the build tasks in the repository with the Nx run-many command. This is similar to Gradle’s ./gradlew build command.

./nx run-many -t build

   ✔  nx run library:classes  [existing outputs match the cache, left as is]
   ✔  nx run library:build  [existing outputs match the cache, left as is]
   ✔  nx run application:classes  [existing outputs match the cache, left as is]
   ✔  nx run application:build  [existing outputs match the cache, left as is]
   ✔  nx run gradle-tutorial:classes (1s)
   ✔  nx run gradle-tutorial:build (1s)

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 NX   Successfully ran target build for 3 projects and 3 tasks they depend on (2s)

Nx read the output from the cache instead of running the command for 4 out of 6 tasks.

Again, because Nx cached the tasks when the application was built, most of the tasks here were near instant. The only ones which needed to be done is the root project’s build. Running the command one more time, will be near instant as then all the tasks will be restored from the cache.

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