nx-lifecycle

An Nx plugin that derives every dependsOn from lifecycle stages you declare once, and the targets you bind to them.

Declare your workflow (build runs hooks pre → run → post, and test runs after build), then bind tools to hooks (tsc to build:run, mocha to test:run):

// nx.json
{
    "plugins": [
        {
            "plugin": "nx-lifecycle/plugin",
            "options": {
                "stages": {
                    "build": { "hooks": ["pre", "run", "post"], "dependsOn": ["^build"] },
                    "test": { "hooks": ["run", "report"], "dependsOn": ["build"] }
                },
                "bindings": {
                    "tsc": "build:run",
                    "mocha": "test:run"
                }
            }
        }
    ]
}

Then nx run <project>:build runs the right steps, in the right order, in any project.

Get started → · Why nx-lifecycle?

Features

• Add a step in one place: Binding a new target, like codegen, lint or a post-build step, rewires every target that depends on its stage, in every project.
• Per-project implementations: Each project opts into the bound targets it declares, so TypeScript, Go and Java projects can all answer to the same build and test.
• Nothing to commit: The plugin infers targets when Nx builds the project graph, and fails with the fix if a project's dependsOn breaks the wiring. An executor that writes the targets to files is also available.
• See what runs: nx-lifecycle explain prints a project's stages in the order they run, with what is bound to each.

Compared to

With hand-written dependsOn in targetDefaults and each project.json, adding a step between two existing ones means editing every target that depended on the first, in every project that has it. With nx-lifecycle, it is one binding.