DevKit & Plugin Documentation

[Brian-McBride]

I've asked about documentation on developing plugins in the past, and I've received the answer, "look at other plugins."

Nx is great - but I feel there is a lost opportunity here by not having great plugin documentation. I've been trying to reverse engineer some plugins to make a nice GraphQL app and lib generators. However, it is time-consuming and frustrating to have to use existing code as documentation - when so many of the Nx plugins don't actually follow their own standard nor match what the Plugin generator creates. As a simple example, Nx uses collection.json instead of generators.json.

There are also a lot of utilities that live in the Nx repo that are not part of the DevKit plugin, but almost all Nx plugins use in their own codebase. If I want to use Nx code as a template, I also have to go and replicate all these utils (even if it is copy/paste, it is still more finding, reverse engineering, and then moving it into my own repo).

I don't mean to complain here. I appreciate all that Nrwl has given the community. I imagine taking on Lerna also reduces the amount of time that can be put on Nx. It seems that by making plugins easier to build - we will get more community members adding to the available library, which will then bring in more Nx users in general.

[JKKGBE]

I too wish someone would consider this issue.

[patdx]

It is probably complicated by the fact that Nx schematics are based on Angular schematics and have some backwards compatibility with them. It is probably easier to grasp for developers coming from an Angular background. (Though, personally I still find it confusing. I can't remember which term is the Nx term vs Angular term)