Empty workspace

A genuinely empty Nx workspace for exercising setup paths — init generators, inference plugins, nx add flows — against the packages in your working tree rather than a published release.

There are no projects, no tsconfig.json and no source files, so whatever a generator does to the workspace is the entire diff.

It is a standalone pnpm workspace with its own lockfile, so installing here never touches the repo root. Local packages are wired in with link: dependencies, which work across workspace boundaries.

Setup

pnpm install

The postinstall builds the linked packages from source, so the workspace runs your working-tree code.

Testing a package

Link whatever you are exercising and add it to the postinstall build list:

// package.json
"devDependencies": {
  "@nx/vite": "link:../../packages/vite"
}

Generators normally reached through nx add resolve from the registry, so for an unpublished or locally modified package call the generator directly:

nx g @nx/oxlint:init

Then inspect what it produced:

git status
nx show projects

Generate a project into the workspace when you need something for an inference plugin to pick up — most of them deliberately skip projects with no matching files:

nx g @nx/js:lib packages/demo --linter oxlint

.vscode/extensions.json mirrors what create-nx-workspace generates, so generators that append editor recommendations have something to append to. They skip workspaces without the file rather than creating one.

Do not give the root a project

The root package.json deliberately has no nx key. Adding one turns the root into a project (root: '.'), and findProjectForPath then matches any path — including paths outside the workspace. Local link: dependencies get treated as workspace source, so Nx loads a plugin's TypeScript source instead of its built dist, and generators fail on NodeNext .js import specifiers that only exist after a build.

Resetting between runs

git clean -fdx . && git checkout -- .
pnpm install