82 lines
5.1 KiB
Markdown
82 lines
5.1 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: Intro to Nx
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description: 'Nx is an AI-first build platform that connects everything from your editor to CI Helping you deliver fast, without breaking things.'
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---
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# What is Nx?
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Nx is a powerful, open source, technology-agnostic build platform designed to efficiently manage codebases of any scale. From small single projects to large enterprise monorepos, Nx is designed to **streamline your development workflows**, **minimize errors** and **dramatically reduce waste** by [saving engineering time](https://youtu.be/2BLqiNnBPuU) and cutting compute costs.
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{% youtube
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src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/-_4WMl-Fn0w"
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title="What is Nx?"
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width="100%" /%}
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As teams and codebases grow, productivity bottlenecks multiply: build times increase, CI becomes flaky, and code sharing becomes complex. **Nx reduces friction across your entire development cycle.**
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## Start small, extend as you grow
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Nx is built in a modular fashion, allowing you to adopt as little or as much as you'd like at any moment in your development lifecycle. You can **start with just the core and add additional capabilities incrementally** as your needs grow and complexity increases.
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At the **foundation is Nx Core**, a Rust-based, technology-agnostic task runner. Nx Core creates a knowledge graph of your workspace, understanding project relationships and dependencies. This enables highly optimized and fast task execution regardless of technology stack. It runs `package.json` scripts in [TypeScript monorepos](/technologies/typescript/introduction) or Gradle tasks in [Java projects](/technologies/java/introduction) or [can be extended](/extending-nx/intro/getting-started) to meet your projects specific needs
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{% callout type="deepdive" title="What do you mean by 'running NPM scripts'?" %}
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At the very core, Nx is a super fast, intelligent task runner. Let's take the example of an NPM workspace. This could be a project's `package.json`:
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```json
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{
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"name": "my-project",
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"scripts": {
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"build": "tsc",
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"test": "jest"
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}
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}
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```
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Then you can simply add Nx to your root `package.json`:
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```json
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{
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"devDependencies": {
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"nx": "latest"
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}
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}
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```
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And once that's done, you can run your tasks via Nx.
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```shell
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nx build my-project
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```
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This will execute the `build` script from `my-project`'s `package.json`, equivalent to running `npm run build` in that project directory.
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Similarly you [can run tasks across all projects](/features/run-tasks), just specific ones or just those from projects you touched.
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From there, you can gradually enhance your setup by adding features like [task caching](/features/cache-task-results), adding [plugins](/technologies), optimizing your CI via [task distribution](/ci/features/distribute-task-execution), and many more powerful capabilities as your needs grow.
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{% /callout %}
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Nx Core works great alone, but you can incrementally add capabilities as needed. Speed up your CI with [**Nx Cloud**](/ci) through remote caching and distributed task execution. Add [**Nx Console**](/getting-started/editor-setup) integrating Nx with your editor, giving you powerful autocomplete support, project graph visualization, CI run notifications and an MCP to [make your AI coding assistant smarter](/features/enhance-AI). Add [**Nx Plugins**](/technologies) for technology-specific automation and DX improvements and build custom capabilities using [Nx Devkit](/extending-nx/intro/getting-started).
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## Where to go from here?
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{% cards %}
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{% card title="Get set up and ready with Nx" description="Dive right in with our getting started steps to install Nx, set up your editor, and create your first project" type="documentation" url="/getting-started" icon="RocketLaunchIcon" /%}
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{% card title="Step by step with our tutorials" description="Learn more about Nx through hands-on tutorials for different technology stacks" type="documentation" url="/getting-started/tutorials" icon="AcademicCapIcon" /%}
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{% card title="Learn with our video courses" description="Dive deeper with comprehensive video courses that walk you through Nx concepts" type="documentation" url="/courses" icon="PlayCircleIcon" /%}
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{% card title="Dive deep into Nx features" description="Discover all the powerful features that Nx provides to streamline your workflow" type="documentation" url="/features" icon="SparklesIcon" /%}
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{% card title="Understand underlying concepts" description="Improve your understanding of the core concepts of how Nx works under the hood" type="documentation" url="/concepts" icon="LightBulbIcon" /%}
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{% card title="Explore Technologies" description="Explore Nx's technology integrations and how it can support your specific stack" type="documentation" url="/technologies" icon="CodeBracketIcon" /%}
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{% /cards %}
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**Stay up to date** with our latest news by [⭐️ starring us on Github](https://github.com/nrwl/nx), [subscribing to our Youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/@nxdevtools), [joining our Discord](https://go.nx.dev/community), [subscribe to our monthly tech newsletter](https://go.nrwl.io/nx-newsletter) or follow us [on X](https://x.com/nxdevtools), [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/nx.dev) and [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/nxdevtools).
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