Manage Your Gradle Project using Nx

Here’s my situation: I have a Gradle workspace with multiple Gradle libraries. How do I easily view the relationships between different libraries? I have a monorepo workspace with both Gradle and Javascript libraries, how do I manage these libraries of different tech stacks?

We are very excited to announce our support for Gradle with our new plugin: @nx/gradle.

The Nx Gradle plugin registers Gradle projects in your Nx workspace. It allows Gradle tasks to be run through Nx. Nx effortlessly makes your CI faster.

Note: this plugin is currently experimental.

This blog will show you:

• What is Nx?
• How to add Nx to a Gradle workspace
• How to add @nx/gradle to an existing Nx workspace

What is Nx?

Before we start, let’s answer this question: what is Nx and why should we use it?

From nx.dev: “Nx is a build system with built-in tooling and advanced CI capabilities. It helps you maintain and scale monorepos, both locally and on CI.” It sounds good, what benefits does it bring?

Nx adds the following features to your workspace:

• Cache task results: By storing task outputs in a cache, subsequent runs can skip redundant computations and reuse previously calculated results, significantly speeding up build processes. Nx intelligently manages this caching mechanism, invalidating the cache automatically when relevant inputs change.
• Distribute task execution: Nx CI efficiently distributes tasks across multiple machines for faster build times. It uses a distributed task execution algorithm to intelligently divide and assign tasks to available resources, minimizing redundant work and maximizing parallelism.
• Run only tasks affected by a PR: Nx identifies changes made since a specified base commit or branch, and then selectively runs tasks (like tests, linting, or builds) related to those changes.
• Interactively explore your workspace: Nx allows developers to visualize and understand the dependencies and relationships within their projects.

How to add Nx to a Gradle Workspace?

Now we understand the benefits of Nx, now let’s set it up. The setup is pretty easy, just need to run one command.

In the workspace, run the below command:

In the terminal, it should output:

That’s it! Now we have Nx in our Gradle project.

Example: Gradle Init

If you create your Gradle workspace using gradle init, by running npx nx@latest init, you will get:

It adds a .nx folder in the workspace root and nx executable files. Now you can run commands using ./nx (or nx.bat for Windows machines).

For example, you can run Gradle tasks using Nx now:

If you build your Gradle library using the command ./gradlew :app:build or gradlew.bat :app:build, you can run ./nx build app or nx.bat build app to build your Gradle library.

Now you can an alternative way to run Gradle tasks, how can we leverage Nx?

Nx Graph

To see the project graph, run the below command:

Run Only Tasks Affected by a PR

As mentioned before, Nx enables the ability to run only the tasks affected by a specific PR by running the below command:

For example, when you run nx affected -t build, Nx uses your git information to determine the files you changed in your PR. Nx determines the list of projects in the workspace that can be affected by this change and only runs the build task against changed files.

You can also visualize the affected projects highlighted using the Nx graph. Simply run:

Nx Console

Furthermore, instead of running the command in terminal, you can use the editor tool Nx Console. Anything you can do with Nx, you can do with Nx Console.

To download:

• Nx Console - Visual Studio Marketplace
• Nx Console - IntelliJ IDEs Plugin | Marketplace

How to add @nx/gradle to an existing Nx workspace?

If you have an existing Nx workspace, to add @nx/gradle, just run:

That is it, it will add @nx/gradle plugin to your Nx workspace.

You can view inferred tasks for Gradle project in your workspace, open the project details view in Nx Console or run nx show project my-project --web in the command line.

For all the interred tasks, you can run using Nx instead of Gradle:

For example, if you run ./gradlew :app:build or gradlew.bat :app:build using Gradle command, to run using Nx: nx build app.

How @nx/gradle Infers Tasks

The @nx/gradle plugin will create an Nx project for each Gradle configuration file present. Any of the following files will be recognized as a Gradle configuration file:

• gradle.build
• gradle.build.kts

@nx/gradle Configuration

The @nx/gradle is configured in the plugins array in nx.json:

Once a Gradle configuration file has been identified, the targets are created with the name you specify under testTargetName, classesTargetName, or buildTargetName in the nx.json plugins array. The default names for the inferred targets are test, classes, and build.

Summary

Here is how to set up Nx with the Gradle workspace. Hopefully, this gives you a good insight into how to get started with Gradle with Nx. The plugin is currently experimental, you can submit GitHub issues: https://github.com/nrwl/nx/issues.

Learn more

• Nx Docs
• X/Twitter -- LinkedIn
• Nx GitHub
• Nx Official Discord Server
• Nx Youtube Channel
• Speed up your CI