Angular Nx Tutorial - Step 1: Create Application

In this tutorial you use Nx to build a full-stack application out of common libraries using modern technologies like Cypress and Nest.

Create a new workspace

Start by creating a new workspace.

npx create-nx-workspace@latest

You then receive the following prompts in your command line:

Workspace name (e.g., org name)     myorg
What to create in the new workspace angular
Application name                    todos
Default stylesheet format           CSS

You can also choose to add Nx Cloud, but its not required for the tutorial.

When asked about 'preset', select angular, and todos for the app name.

myorg/
├── apps/
│   ├── todos/
│   │   ├── src/
│   │   │   ├── app/
│   │   │   ├── assets/
│   │   │   ├── environments/
│   │   │   ├── favicon.ico
│   │   │   ├── index.html
│   │   │   ├── main.ts
│   │   │   ├── polyfills.ts
│   │   │   ├── styles.scss
│   │   │   └── test-setup.ts
│   │   ├── .browserslistrc
│   │   ├── .eslintrc.json
│   │   ├── jest.config.js
│   │   ├── project.json
│   │   ├── tsconfig.app.json
│   │   ├── tsconfig.editor.json
│   │   ├── tsconfig.json
│   │   └── tsconfig.spec.json
│   └── todos-e2e/
│       ├── src/
│       │   ├── fixtures/
│       │   │   └── example.json
│       │   ├── integration/
│       │   │   └── app.spec.ts
│       │   ├── plugins/
│       │   │   └── index.ts
│       │   └── support/
│       │       ├── app.po.ts
│       │       ├── commands.ts
│       │       └── index.ts
│       ├── cypress.json
│       ├── project.json
│       └── tsconfig.json
├── libs/
├── tools/
├── .eslintrc.json
├── .prettierrc
├── angular.json
├── decorate-angular-cli.js
├── jest.config.js
├── jest.preset.js
├── nx.json
├── package.json
├── README.md
└── tsconfig.base.json

The generate command added two projects to our workspace:

  • An Angular application
  • E2E tests for the Angular application

Serve the newly created application

Now that the application is set up, run it locally via:

npx nx serve todos

Note on the Nx CLI

If you would prefer to run using a global installation of Nx, you can run:

nx serve todos

Depending on how your dev env is set up, the command above might result in Command 'nx' not found.

To fix it, you can either install the nx cli globally by running:

yarn global add nx

Alternatively, you can run the local installation of Nx by prepending every command with npx:

yarn nx serve todos

Note on nx serve and ng serve

The Nx CLI syntax is intentionally similar to the Angular CLI. The nx serve command produces the same result as ng serve, and nx build produces the same results as ng build. However, the Nx CLI supports advanced capabilities that aren't supported by the Angular CLI. For instance, Nx's computation cache only works when using the Nx CLI. In other words, using nx instead of ng results in the same output, but often performs a lot better.

What's Next