Caching & dependencies between targets

Description

Adding the ability to specify dependencies between targets (and optionally, configurations) and ensuring these targets / configurations have been run before executing the current target.

Motivation

I’ve got a workspace with a lot of projects. Each of those projects have “build” and “deploy” targets. When running “deploy”, I first have to make sure I’ve already run “build”, otherwise (obviously) I’ll deploy the wrong version.

This is on top of dependencies between projects, which I also have.

The ideal is that when I run nx run my-project:deploy --withDeps it should first execute my-project:build.

An additional wrinkle is that, regardless of the configuration I’m using to deploy, I always want to run the production build configuration.

Suggested Implementation

Ideally in angular.json, add a field to each target: dependsOnTargets. This is an array of strings formatted {target}[:{configuration}].

Before running any target, nx should first run each target in dependsOnTargets. Just as if a target is run directly, the cached result should be used if available.

Alternate Implementations

Essentially the same as above, but in nx.json instead.

[rgoomar]

Just adding on that this type of feature would be great to have. I’m running into a similar issue and using the run-commands with chained commands feels like a hack and does not work in the desired way I want.

For example, if I have Project X which has a target called serve that depends on Project Y and Project Z to be served as well prior to it being run, if I chain them, since it starts a server for each, it doesn’t have a graceful “end” to the task since it will end with like Served on localhost:3000. The problem here is that since it runs the first Project X serve, it ends up not continuing since the command hasn’t technically “finished”.

It would be nice to just have something like Gradle’s dependsOn or Bazel’s :deps to explicitly define target dependencies. It also makes it more clear so you don’t have to have separate targets and create a “wrapper” target that encompasses those.

[sweepy84]

Really need this feature too. Can be easily done with Turborepo