Target Descriptions

[ethanjdiamond]

• I'd be willing to implement this feature (contributing guide)

Description

An optional "description" field for target definitions that is a human readable description of the target. This would then be surfaced in nx graph, nx show [project] and the nx plugin for VSCode.

Motivation

As monorepos grow large, you tend to get a large variety of targets that need to be run to accomplish different tasks. It's not always obvious from context what a target does, or how to use it. For example, a target might require an extra argument that's expected to be used like nx run project:install -- otherpackage, but there's nowhere great to quickly capture that information for other developers who are unfamiliar with your project. It'd be great to see at a glance, particularly in the nx VS plugin, a list of a projects targets and what they do.

Suggested Implementation

A target definition in a project.json file would include a field for "description" that is free-text. The ProjectConfiguration for project nodes would pick up that string and store it as part of the target definition. Dev tools would then present that field if present.

Alternate Implementations

I'm not sure if there's a particularly good alternate option worth considering that achieves the goal.

[alberturria]

I see it's been a while already, but I'd love to have this feature too. (And I'm also willing to help there! 🙂)
Is there any new regarding this?

[FrozenPandaz]

This feature is now available: You can specify the description for your project under metadata:

project.json

{
  metadata: {
    description: 'This is the marketing app'
  }
}

The same is available for targets.

I'll get this documented.

[github-actions]

This issue has been closed for more than 30 days. If this issue is still occuring, please open a new issue with more recent context.