Installation

Create a new Nx workspace using the following command:

This will guide you through the setup, asking whether you want a monorepo or a standalone app and whether you want to start with a blank or a preconfigured setup.

Once you've created your workspace, you can

• run single tasks with npx nx <target> <project>
• run multiple tasks with npx nx run-many -t <target1> <target2>

Run npx nx run-many -t build twice to see how Nx's powerful caching speeds up your build.

Learn more about running tasks.

Installing Nx Into an Existing Repository

If you want to add Nx to an existing repository run:

You can also manually install the nx NPM package and create a nx.json to configure it. Learn more about adopting Nx in an existing project

Installing Nx Globally

You can install Nx globally. Depending on your package manager, use one of the following commands:

The advantage of a global installation is that you don't have to prefix your commands with npx, yarn or pnpm. The global Nx installation hands off the process execution to the local Nx installation in your repository, which eliminates any issues with outdated globally installed packages.

Updating your global Nx installation

There are some cases where an issue could arise when using an outdated global installation of Nx. If the structure of your Nx workspace no longer matches up with what the globally installed copy of Nx expects, it may fail to hand off to your local installation properly and instead error. This commonly results in errors such as:

• Could not find Nx modules in this workspace.
• The current directory isn't part of an Nx workspace.

If you find yourself in this position, you will need to update your global install of Nx.

In most cases, you can update a globally installed npm package by rerunning the command you used to install it, as described above

If you cannot remember which package manager you installed Nx globally with or are still encountering issues, you can locate other installs of Nx with these commands:

You can then remove the extra global installations by running the following commands for the duplicate installations:

Finally, to complete your global installation update, simply reinstall it as described above.

Self-managed Nx installation

This type of installation is useful for repositories that may not contain any JavaScript or TypeScript (e.g. .Net or Java based workspaces that want to leverage Nx features). In such setup Nx is able to manage its own installation via a .nx directory.

By allowing Nx to manage its installation, a given repository is no longer required to contain a package.json or node_modules in its root.

Usage

You can install Nx in the .nx/installation directory by running nx init in a directory without package.json, and picking to install Nx in the current directory.

When Nx is installed in .nx, you can run Nx via a global Nx installation or the nx and nx.bat scripts that were created. In either case, the wrapper (.nx/nxw.js) will be invoked and ensure that the current workspace is up to date prior to invoking Nx.