Nx was created by Nrwl (pronounced “narwhal”), founded by Jeff Cross and Victor Savkin in 2017. Both founders were previously on the Angular team at Google. The company is based in Narberth, Pennsylvania and has raised funding to support Nx’s development.
Nx started as a tool for Angular monorepos but has expanded to support React, Vue, Node.js, Nest.js, Next.js, and even non-JavaScript languages like Go and Rust. It’s one of the most feature-rich monorepo tools available, with capabilities that go well beyond just running builds.
The computation caching system is at Nx’s heart. It hashes your source files, dependencies, and configuration to create cache keys. If the inputs haven’t changed, Nx replays the cached output instantly. Nx Cloud extends this with distributed caching and distributed task execution — splitting CI work across multiple machines automatically.
Nx’s dependency graph visualization is genuinely useful. Running “nx graph” opens an interactive diagram showing how all your projects relate to each other. The “affected” command figures out which projects are impacted by your changes and runs tests only for those projects.
Generators and plugins automate repetitive tasks like creating new libraries, components, or services. The plugin ecosystem includes official plugins for major frameworks and community plugins for everything else. Nx has over 23,000 GitHub stars and is used by companies like FedEx, Cisco, Capital One, and VMware. The team ships major updates regularly, with Nx 19 introducing project crystal for automatic plugin detection.
