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Building Scalable Applications with Remix and Nx
When it comes to building production-grade applications, speed and resilience are crucial. That’s where Remix, a full-stack framework, and Nx, an open-source build system, come into play. By combining these two powerful tools, you can create a monorepo application that’s fast, efficient, and easy to maintain.
The Benefits of Monorepos
So, why choose a monorepo structure? For starters, it allows for code sharing and visibility across multiple projects, reducing repetitive code and promoting reusable patterns. It also enables atomic changes, making it easier to track and manage changes across multiple projects. Additionally, monorepos can help standardize code and tooling across teams, impose branch restrictions, and enforce naming guidelines and best practices.
Creating an Nx Workspace
To get started, let’s create an Nx workspace and integrate it with a Remix application. First, we’ll create a new project and add the necessary commands to set up our monorepo. Then, we’ll create a couple of directories inside our app and configure them properly to recognize this as a workspace.
Using Shared Packages
One of the benefits of using a monorepo is the ability to create shared packages that can be used across multiple projects. Let’s create a shared UI library that we can use in any project inside our monorepo. We’ll create a new package.json file, mark it private, and install React and TypeScript as dev dependencies.
Creating a Shared Component
Next, let’s create a shared component inside our React app that can be used inside our Remix project. We’ll create a new file, Card.tsx, and add a TypeScript compiler to handle our compilation output.
Using the Shared Component
Now that we have our shared component, let’s register it with our Remix application. We’ll use the pnpm filter command to build just the shared project, and then serve our Remix app to see the reflected changes.
Running Tasks with Nx
Nx is a powerful tool that allows us to run operations across the entire monorepo workspace. We can use Nx to cache contents, determine whether to run tasks, and selectively specify individual projects. Let’s install Nx and try running the build for our shared package.
Configuring the Cache
One of the benefits of Nx is its caching speed. We can enable caching in our application by creating a new file, nx.json, and adding the necessary configuration. This will allow us to test the cache and see the time difference.
Adding Task Dependencies with a Build Pipeline
Finally, let’s consider cases where dependent apps inside shared are not compiled and ready to use inside our Remix server. We can tackle this by manually building shared and then the Remix apps, or by using Nx’s targetDefaults definition to prioritize the build process.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve learned how to leverage Nx to build a monorepo with a Remix application. We’ve seen how using monorepos can improve the development experience and speed of building applications without limitations on scaling. Nx is an excellent choice for building standalone or monorepo projects, and its caching feature makes it even more efficient. You can find our full implementation of Nx with Remix in this GitHub repository.