Nx

Nx is a build system and monorepo platform designed to help teams build, test, and ship code at scale across different languages and frameworks.

We put Turborepo on hold because its core focus is JavaScript/TypeScript, while we need a broader, polyglot setup. Nx better supports our direction to run and coordinate workloads beyond JavaScript/TypeScript, including Terraform and Java, in the same workspace.

Key capabilities

Affected commands: Nx tracks the dependency graph of your workspace and only runs tasks (build, test, lint, etc.) for projects that are actually affected by a given change. This dramatically reduces CI times as the repository grows.

Local computation caching: Nx caches task outputs locally. Repeated runs of the same task with the same inputs are instant, restoring outputs from cache rather than rerunning the computation.

Plugin ecosystem: The @nx/* plugin family provides first-class integrations for common tools and frameworks (Node.js, React, Vite, ESLint, etc.), so projects get consistent, pre-configured targets without boilerplate.

Dependency graph visualization: Running nx graph renders an interactive visualization of all projects and their dependencies. This makes it easy to reason about the blast radius of a change and understand the overall architecture of the workspace.

MCP server / AI integration: Nx ships an MCP server (@nx/mcp) and ready-made agent skills that expose workspace context and best practices to AI assistants. This helps tools like GitHub Copilot query targets and configurations, run tasks, and use generators with reliable, workspace-aware guidance.

Release automation: Nx provides nx release to automate versioning, changelog generation, and package publishing across interdependent packages in your monorepo. It analyzes commit history and dependency changes to determine version bumps (following semantic versioning), generates changelogs automatically, and publishes packages. This is a built-in alternative to tools like Changeset for monorepos using Nx.

Use cases

• Orchestrating build, test, lint, and typecheck tasks across all packages in a monorepo
• Running only affected tasks on pull requests to keep CI fast
• Visualizing and auditing project interdependencies
• Automating version bumps, changelog generation, and package publishing with nx release across interdependent packages

Reference of usage in our organization

• https://github.com/pagopa/dx