Automate Updating Dependencies

Keeping your tooling up to date is crucial for the health of your project. Tooling maintenance work can be tedious and time consuming, though. The Nx migrate functionality provides a way for you to

  • automatically update your package.json dependencies
  • migrate your configuration files (e.g. Jest, ESLint, Nx config)
  • adjust your source code to match the new versions of packages (e.g., migrating across breaking changes)

To update your workspace, run:

❯

npx nx migrate latest

How Does It Work?

Nx knows where its configuration files are located and ensures they match the expected format. This automated update process, commonly referred to as "migration," becomes even more powerful when you leverage Nx plugins. Each plugin can provide migrations for its area of competency.

For example, the Nx React plugin knows where to look for React and Nx specific configuration files and knows how to apply certain changes when updating to a given version of React.

In the example below, the React plugin defines a migration script (./src/migrations/.../add-babel-core) that runs when upgrading to Nx 16.7.0-beta.2 (or higher).

migrations.json
1{ 2 "generators": { 3 ... 4 "add-babel-core": { 5 ... 6 "version": "16.7.0-beta.2", 7 "implementation": "./src/migrations/update-16-7-0/add-babel-core" 8 }, 9 }, 10} 11

When running nx migrate latest, Nx parses all the available plugins and their migration files and applies the necessary changes to your workspace.

How Do I Upgrade My Nx Workspace?

Updating your Nx workspace happens in three steps:

  1. The installed dependencies, including the package.json and node_modules, are updated.
  2. Nx produces a migrations.json file containing the migrations to be run based on your workspace configuration. You can inspect and adjust the file. Run the migrations to update your configuration files and source code.
  3. Optionally, you can remove the migrations.json file or keep it to re-run the migration in different Git branches.

You can intervene at each step and make adjustments as needed for your specific workspaces. This is especially important in large codebases where you might want to control the changes more granularly.

Step 1: Update Dependencies and Generate Migrations

First, run the migrate command:

❯

nx migrate latest

Note you can also specify an exact version by replacing latest with nx@<version>.

Update One Major Version at a Time

To avoid potential issues, it is recommended to update one major version of Nx at a time.

This results in:

  • The package.json being updated
  • A migrations.json being generated if there are pending migrations.

At this point, no packages have been installed, and no other files have been touched.

Now, you can inspect package.json to see if the changes make sense. Sometimes the migration can update a package to a version that is either not allowed or conflicts with another package. Feel free to manually apply the desired adjustments. Also look at the migrations.json for the type of migrations that are going to be applied.

Step 2: Run Migrations

You can now run the actual code migrations that were generated in the migrations.json in the previous step.

❯

nx migrate --run-migrations

Depending on the migrations that ran, this might update your source code and configuration files in your workspace. All the changes will be unstaged ready for you to review and commit yourself.

Migrations are version specific

Note that each Nx plugin is able to provide a set of migrations which are relevant to particular versions of the package. Hence migrations.json will only contain migrations which are appropriate for the update you are currently applying.

Step 3: Clean Up

After you run all the migrations, you can remove migrations.json and commit any outstanding changes.

Note: You may want to keep the migrations.json until every branch that was created before the migration has been merged. Leaving the migrations.json in place allows devs to run nx migrate --run-migrations to apply the same migration process to their newly merged code as well.

Step 4: Update Community Plugins (Optional)

If you have any Nx community plugins installed you need to migrate them individually (assuming they provide migration scripts) by using the following command:

❯

nx migrate my-plugin

For a list of all the plugins you currently have installed, run:

❯

nx report

Keep Nx Packages on the Same Version

When you run nx migrate, the nx package and all the @nx/ packages get updated to the same version. It is important to keep these versions in sync to have Nx work properly.

As long as you run nx migrate instead of manually changing the version numbers, you shouldn't have to worry about it. Also, when you add a new plugin, use nx add <plugin> to automatically install the version that matches your repository's version of Nx.

Need to Opt-out of Some Migrations?

Sometimes you need to temporarily opt-out from some migrations because your workspace is not ready yet. You can manually adjust the migrations.json or run the update with the --interactive flag to choose which migrations you accept.

Find more details in our Advanced Update Process guide.

Recipes

Reference