I Tried Nx Plugin for AWS, Here's Why I'm Sold

Who hasn't built a full-stack app on AWS before, we all know the drill. You need an API (usually Lambda with API Gateway), a frontend, some authentication (Cognito) wired up, and IaC (CDK) to help deploy the app. On their own, none of that is hard, but wiring it up all together, especially in a team where every developer has their own style, always takes an amount of time before you even get to write a single line for the business logic. Nx Plugin for AWS ( @aws/nx-plugin ), an AWS Labs open source project, tackles that problem with code generators built on top of Nx . Instead of once again writing out boilerplate for every new service or website, you can just run a generator (CLI), answer a few questions, and get production-ready application code plus the CDK or Terraform to deploy it. This article introduces what the plugin does, the core concepts, and how to scaffold a complete full-stack app. What sets Nx Plugin apart from just another scaffolding tool? A note on versioning: at time of this article the plugin was pre-1.0, currently working through a 1.0.0-rc.x release candidate series with regular updates. Commands and generator names below were accurate at time of writing, check npm view @aws/nx-plugin version before you start, given the pace, it's likely to have moved on since this article published. A quick primer on Nx For the uninitiated Nx is a toolkit specifically for monorepos. Two things define Nx: A dependency graph across projects. Nx knows how the individual parts of your projects relate to each other (which website depends on which API, which library is shared where), and it uses that graph to only build, test, or lint the things actually affected by a change, with results cached so recurring CI/CD runs should be fast. Generators. Nx has a plugin system where a package can register generators, scripts that scaffold or modify code in your workspace, invoked via the nx g (or nx generate ) command. This is the bit @aws/nx-plugin builds on. Nx is not AW