How to trigger Nx Release on apps/* when changes made to dependent libs/* modules?

Question

Im experimenting with nx release and cannot figure out how make the command release an app when I make a change to a dependent module. Looking at the below graph, you can see i have 3 apps, 2 are dependent on the shared-ui module.

If I make direct changes to the apps, nx release detects the changes (via conventional commits) and continues as expected. I've now made a change to the shared-ui module and committed it as fix(shared-ui): made a change. I expected that task-management-web and sales-orders-web would have their patch version incremented, but nx release does not detect any changes.

The changes to shared-ui are being done in a branch. The list of affected apps is correct;

$ nx show projects --type app --affected
sales-orders-web
company-web

but nx release does not detect the changes.

Even explicitly listing the projects to release yields the same output, ie:

$ nx release --projects sales-orders-web company-web --dry-run --skip-publish

Does anyone know how I can resolve this issue?

Thanks, Grant

Answer 1

I found this issue (https://github.com/nrwl/nx/issues/26041) and associated reproducer project (https://github.com/JamesHenry/nx-26041) that helped solve this same problem for me.

The key parts were to include the following snippet in the nx.json

{
    "release": {
        "generatorOptions": {
            "updateDependents": "auto"

        }
    }
}

And include a reference to the library in each application project package.json

{
    "name": "@repo/app1",
    "dependencies": {
        "@repo/lib": "x.x.x."
    }
}

After including these changes the nx release command would release and publish both the changed library and the indirectly impacted application.