The Nx Plugin for Express contains executors and generators for allowing your workspace to create powerful Express Node applications and APIs.

![Express Logo](/shared/express-logo.png)

[Express](https://expressjs.com/) is mature, minimal, and an open source web framework for making web applications and
apis.

## Setting Up Express

To create a new workspace with Express, run the following command:

```shell
 npx create-nx-workspace --preset=express
```

### Adding Express to an Existing Project

Install the express plugin

```shell
npm install --save-dev @nrwl/express
```

```shell
yarn add --dev @nrwl/express
```

## Creating Applications

Add a new application to your workspace with the following command:

```shell
nx g @nrwl/express:app my-app
```

Serve the application by running

```shell
nx serve my-app
```

This starts the application on localhost:3333/api by default.

> Express does not come with any library generators, but you can leverage the[`@nrwl/js`](/packages/js#create-libraries) plugin to generate a Node.js library for your express application.

### Application Proxies

The Express application generator has an option to configure other projects in the workspace to proxy API requests. This
can be done by passing the `--frontendProject` with the project name you wish to enable proxy support for.

```shell
nx g @nrwl/express:app <express-app> --frontendProject my-react-app
```

## Using Express

### Testing Projects

You can run unit tests with:

```shell
nx test <project-name>
```

### Building Projects

Express projects can be built with:

```shell
nx build <project-name>
```

Build artifacts will be found in the `dist` directory under `apps/<project-name>` by default. Customize the build
configuration by editing `outputPath` in the [project configuration](/reference/project-configuration).

### Waiting for Other Tasks

You can wait for other tasks to run before serving the express app which can be handy for spinning up various services
the application depends on— for example, other apis in a microservice.

Setting the `waitUntilTargets` option with an array of targets (format: `"project:target"`) executes those tasks
before serving the Express application.

## More Documentation

- [Using Jest](/packages/jest)
- [@nrwl/js](/packages/js)
- [Express](https://expressjs.com/)


Overview

init

Init Express Plugin

application

Frontend project that needs to access this application. This sets up proxy configuration.

Generate JavaScript files rather than TypeScript files.

Whether or not to configure the ESLint `parserOptions.project` option. We do not do this by default for lint performance reasons.

Do not add dependencies to `package.json`.

Split the project configuration into `<projectRoot>/project.json` rather than including it inside `workspace.json`.

@nrwl/express:application

Usage

Options

babelJest

directory

frontendProject

js

linter

name

pascalCaseFiles

skipFormat

skipPackageJson

standaloneConfig

setParserOptionsProject

tags

unitTestRunner