Nx Run Tasks

Tooling

Execute build, test, lint, serve, and other tasks in an Nx workspace using single runs, run-many, and affected commands. Use when user says "run tests", "build my app", "lint affected", "serve the project", "run all tasks", or "nx affected". Do NOT use for code generation (use nx-generate) or workspace configuration (use nx-workspace).

npx @tech-leads-club/agent-skills install --skill nx-run-tasks

What Nx Run Tasks does

Execute build, test, lint, serve, and other tasks in an Nx workspace using single runs, run-many, and affected commands.

When to use it

  • user says "run tests"
  • "build my app"
  • "lint affected"
  • "serve the project"
  • "run all tasks"
  • "nx affected"

When not to use it

  • code generation (use nx-generate) or workspace configuration (use nx-workspace)

You can run tasks with Nx in the following way.

Keep in mind that you might have to prefix things with npx/pnpx/yarn if the user doesn't have nx installed globally. Look at the package.json or lockfile to determine which package manager is in use.

For more details on any command, run it with --help (e.g. nx run-many --help, nx affected --help).

Understand which tasks can be run

You can check those via nx show project <projectname> --json, for example nx show project myapp --json. It contains a targets section which has information about targets that can be run. You can also just look at the package.json scripts or project.json targets, but you might miss out on inferred tasks by Nx plugins.

Run a single task

nx run <project>:<task>

where project is the project name defined in package.json or project.json (if present).

Run multiple tasks

nx run-many -t build test lint typecheck

You can pass a -p flag to filter to specific projects, otherwise it runs on all projects. You can also use --exclude to exclude projects, and --parallel to control the number of parallel processes (default is 3).

Examples:

  • nx run-many -t test -p proj1 proj2 — test specific projects
  • nx run-many -t test --projects=*-app --exclude=excluded-app — test projects matching a pattern
  • nx run-many -t test --projects=tag:api-* — test projects by tag

Run tasks for affected projects

Use nx affected to only run tasks on projects that have been changed and projects that depend on changed projects. This is especially useful in CI and for large workspaces.

nx affected -t build test lint

By default it compares against the base branch. You can customize this:

  • nx affected -t test --base=main --head=HEAD — compare against a specific base and head
  • nx affected -t test --files=libs/mylib/src/index.ts — specify changed files directly

Useful flags

These flags work with run, run-many, and affected:

  • --skipNxCache — rerun tasks even when results are cached
  • --verbose — print additional information such as stack traces
  • --nxBail — stop execution after the first failed task
  • --configuration=<name> — use a specific configuration (e.g. production)

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