Project types

[akwodkiewicz]

Current Behavior

Project types

I feel there is a big gaping hole when it comes to "project types" that needs to be addressed. My report is about several issues that I had over the last weeks, all related to project types.

Values discrepancy

nx show projects' --type argument expects: "app", "lib", "e2e".

In the documentation and project.json schema, the projects however can have 2 types: "application" or "library".

E2E implicitness

I have a project named e2e that is defined to be of type application. I want this project to be returned by nx show projects --affected --type=app, because my CI needs to build all Docker images for affected apps that will be later deployed/run. That means apps, but also "test projects" (including, but not limited to the e2e project).

The command does not return e2e on the list of projects. Why? Because there is an implicit e2e project type, that is overriding my projectType: "application". It is not documented properly and I assume it's set based on either the "e2e" prefix or the suffix (or both?) in the project name. My workaround will naturally be to rename the project, but I have to do it only because of this implicit behaviour that is not documented anywhere. Why is this e2e project type overriding my application type? Why isn't there some kind of a warning? Why isn't e2e a separate project type that I could set inside the project.json file?

What is E2E

I have a big project with a big number of integration tests that I wanted to parallelize on CI. Since I do not use any plugins I decided to extract integration tests into multiple my-project-int--domain-a, my-project-int--domain-b, ... projects manually, mimicking the convention used by the Atomizer feature. But I did not use e2e in the name of the projects, because it would be misunderstood by the rest of the team, where they expect "e2e" to mean browser-based tests. I used "int" infix. Was this a good call? Am I now missing some out-of-the-box features provided by Nx just because the names of the projects do not contain "e2e"? Or maybe it's good they don't contain "e2e", because "e2e" is not meant to be for integration tests?

Why is the e2e its own type and at the same time it's not explicit? Why is it that it's "e2e" and not "tests" or why "integration-tests" do not have their own category? The convention is not explained anywhere in the docs. "e2e" got their own part of documentation only because there is now a new feature called Atomizer, but it is actually not about the convention, but the feature itself. It's explained technically in the context of plugins that allow splitting e2e tests in the "Integrated approach". There is no info on why "e2e" projects are treated differently by Nx, which is especially surprising to teams using a package-based approach, with no test-oriented Nx plugins. There is no info what Nx actually means by e2e tests (are these always browser-based tests (Cypress/Playwright style), or do backend-only API tests count as well).

Expected Behavior

• Please provide some info on what e2e actually mean for Nx. This will help teams end long debates and misunderstandings related to naming conventions in the projects. This is extremely important when bringing Nx into an existing project.

• Please consider e2e or a new test-like explicit project type which can be used in project.json and is not overridden by any other implicit mechanism. This will help meeting the expectations of the CLI behaviour.

• Or consider not overriding explicitly set projectTypes with e2e if the name matches some naming pattern (what is this pattern, BTW?)

GitHub Repo

No response

Steps to Reproduce

N/A

Nx Report

Node           : 18.19.1
OS             : darwin-arm64
Native Target  : aarch64-macos
yarn           : 4.2.2

nx (global)  : 19.5.3
nx           : 19.6.1
@nrwl/tao    : 19.6.1
typescript   : 5.2.2

Failure Logs

No response

Package Manager Version

No response

Operating System

• macOS
• Linux
• Windows
• Other (Please specify)

Additional Information

No response

[akwodkiewicz]

Even one more discrepancy -- this e2e project's type I mention above is displayed as "Application" when you run nx show project: