Should nx release have an option to Include changes from non-buildable shared libraries in app changelogs?

[waldemarnt]

First of all, thank you for the amazing work on Nx — it has been central to how we scale development at our company. I’d like to raise a potential gap in the current nx release implementation, particularly around changelog generation for apps that depend on non-buildable shared libraries.

🧩 Context

We use a modular monorepo with Nx and NestJS.

• Our apps (e.g. billing-api, monolith) depend on shared NestJS modules (shared-lib, auth, utils, etc.).
• Our apps have different release lifecycles, they need to be released at different times.
• Our monorepo is setup for indepent releases
• These shared modules are non-buildable, because we use a bundler (e.g. Webpack) to bundle the entire app and its dependencies into a single artifact.
• We don’t publish these shared libraries — they are bundled at build time, inside the app artifact.

🎯 Our goal

When we release an app (e.g. billing-api), we want to:

• Bump and tag only the app (not the libraries).
• Generate a complete changelog for that app, including:
• Changes inside the app folder (e.g. apps/billing-api/**)
• Changes in any shared library used by the app (e.g. libs/shared-lib/**)

🤔 The current challenge

When we run:

nx release billing-api

• The versioning step works fine: only billing-api is bumped ✅
• But the changelog includes only changes inside apps/billing-api/** ❌
• Any commits that touched shared libraries are excluded from the changelog, even though they will be bundled into the app and deployed.

💡 What we’re looking for

We’re wondering:

1. Is there currently a way to configure nx release changelog to include transitive dependency changes (non-buildable libs) in the app changelog?
2. Has the community adopted a workaround for this?

• E.g. custom changelog renderer?
• Explicit inclusion of affected libs as CLI args?

🧠 Why this matters

For teams using Nx with NestJS and apps that bundle everything together (without publishing shared libs), the app’s changelog is the true unit of change. Omitting changes in shared modules creates blind spots in audits and releases.

We’d love to hear how others are solving this — and whether this is something that could be improved natively in Nx.