Incremental Builds With Nx
When working on large-scale projects, optimizing build times is crucial to maintaining developer efficiency and productivity. Nx is a powerful tool that provides a solution to this problem through its support for incremental builds.
What are Incremental Builds?
Incremental builds are a feature that allows developers to only rebuild parts of the codebase that have changed since the last build. This can significantly reduce build times for projects with large codebases, as only the necessary modules are recompiled instead of rebuilding the entire project from scratch.
How Nx Supports Incremental Builds
Nx leverages the concept of distributed development, where different parts of the project are broken down into independent and self-contained units called “workspaces”. Each workspace can have its own configuration and dependencies, allowing developers to work on different parts of the project in isolation.
When a change is made to a workspace, Nx intelligently determines which parts of the project are affected and only rebuilds those specific parts. This granular approach to building ensures that only the necessary modules are recompiled, resulting in faster build times and improved developer productivity.
Benefits of Incremental Builds with Nx
- Reduced build times: By only rebuilding the parts of the project that have changed, developers can significantly decrease build times and iterate more quickly.
- Improved developer efficiency: With faster build times, developers can focus on writing code and implementing features without being slowed down by lengthy build processes.
- Enhanced project maintainability: Incremental builds help to keep the project organized and make it easier to track and manage changes.
Getting Started with Incremental Builds in Nx
To take advantage of incremental builds in Nx, developers can simply run the nx build command with the --incremental flag. This will trigger an incremental build and only rebuild the parts of the project that have changed.
By incorporating incremental builds into your development workflow with Nx, you can streamline the build process, improve productivity, and maintain a more efficient and scalable codebase.
You say it's enabled out of the box – but my understanding is that it's not, and for good reason? You have to manually enable buildLibsFromSource, and it's actually not recommended to do so (at least, last time I asked), as it's a slower process than just building it all from one bundle. Is this thinking outdated now?
Are you sure the Vite plugin is configured to do this out-of-the-box? I've recently opened the issue 17322 reporting that the Vite build executor is missing the falsy buildLibsFromSource code. The tsconfig.generated.json with the path mapping rewrite pointing to the build artifacts doesn't get created with the current implementation (v16.3.2). Isn't it necessary for Vite building process? Or is there an underlying Vite mechanism that already implements incremental builds?
This does not work with storybook builds, right?
I make stuff like this ❤