Unlock the Power of Nx: A Game-Changing Build Tool for React Developers
As a web developer, you know how crucial it is to have the right tools to streamline your workflow and boost productivity. That’s where Nx comes in – a revolutionary build framework that’s been gaining popularity among JavaScript framework enthusiasts. Nx automates many manual tasks, making it an indispensable asset for any developer.
Getting Started with Nx
To create a Nx workspace, use npx by running a simple command. You can also install Nx globally. The CLI will guide you through a series of questions, scaffolding out the main skeleton of your project. For our example, we’ll build a React application with a file structure that includes an apps directory, featuring two folders: one for the project itself and another for running end-to-end tests with Cypress.
Building a Simple To-Do List App
Let’s create an API alongside our React project using Express. Nx allows you to add an API to your project in a single command. We’ll install the express plugin with the Nx CLI and create the API. The resulting folder structure will feature a full Express app scaffolded with main.ts, an entrypoint file.
Scaffolding the Application
Now that we have the building blocks in place, let’s take a closer look at what we’ve built so far. In the apps folder, you’ll see the React app built with the traditional folder structure commonly seen in assets, styles, index, main, and app files. The api project is a full Express app scaffolded with main.ts, an entrypoint file. Finally, the first-project-e2e folder features the Cypress project with the traditional structure of any Cypress test suite.
Calling the API
To demonstrate the power of Nx, we’ll add a feature that showcases the CLI in action. We’ll build a simple to-do application with React and Nx. First, we’ll create a file called apps/api/src/app/todos.ts and add the necessary code to create routes for our API. Next, we’ll register the routes with our API by modifying the apps/api/src/main.ts file.
Integrating the API with Our App
To call the API from our app, we’ll set up a proxy so that API calls from our React app call the API directly. We’ll modify the workspace.json file and add the necessary code to the proxyConfig setting in the apps/first-project/proxy.conf.json file. Finally, we’ll modify the main.ts file in the first-project folder to call the API instead of relying on local state.
Testing with Cypress
As mentioned earlier, Nx comes with Cypress tests built-in when the app is scaffolded. To see testing in action, we’ll modify the test file at apps/first-project-e2e/src/support/app.po.ts and the file at apps/first-project-e2e/src/integration/app.spec.ts. Run npx nx e2e first-project-e2e –watch to see your tests in action!
Exploring Additional Nx Features
The Nx CLI has many features beyond what we’ve covered so far. One of the most useful is the ability to generate a dependency graph for your project, which simplifies complex projects through data visualizations. Nx also allows you to create libraries and computation caching for performance.
Next Steps
In this tutorial, we’ve covered the basics of using React and Nx by scaffolding a simple to-do application. The next step would be to build the assets and deploy them. Nx can automate builds for small projects and scale to larger projects with enterprise applications. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this post and have been inspired to check out Nx and use it with React.
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