Configuring CI Using Bitbucket Pipelines and Nx

There are two general approaches to setting up CI with Nx - using a single job or distributing tasks across multiple jobs. For smaller repositories, a single job is faster and cheaper, but once a full CI run starts taking 10 to 15 minutes, using multiple jobs becomes the better option. Nx Cloud's distributed task execution allows you to keep the CI pipeline fast as you scale. As the repository grows, all you need to do is add more agents.

Process Only Affected Projects With One Job on Bitbucket Pipelines

Below is an example of an Bitbucket Pipelines setup that runs on a single job, building and testing only what is affected. This uses the nx affected command to run the tasks only for the projects that were affected by that PR.

bitbucket-pipelines.yml
1image: node:20 2pipelines: 3 pull-requests: 4 '**': 5 - step: 6 name: 'Build and test affected apps on Pull Requests' 7 caches: # optional 8 - node 9 script: 10 - npm ci 11 - npx nx format:check 12 - npx nx affected -t lint,test,build --base=origin/master --head=HEAD --configuration=ci 13 14 branches: 15 main: 16 - step: 17 name: "Build and test affected apps on 'main' branch changes" 18 caches: # optional 19 - node 20 script: 21 - npm ci 22 - npx nx format:check 23 - npx nx affected -t lint,test,build --base=HEAD~1 --configuration=ci 24

The pull-requests and main jobs implement the CI workflow.

Distribute Tasks Across Agents on Bitbucket Pipelines

To set up Distributed Task Execution (DTE), you can run this generator:

npx nx g ci-workflow --ci=bitbucket-pipelines

Or you can copy and paste the workflow below:

bitbucket-pipelines.yml
1image: node:20 2 3clone: 4 depth: full 5 6definitions: 7 steps: 8 - step: &agent 9 name: Agent 10 script: 11 - export NX_BRANCH=$BITBUCKET_PR_ID 12 13 - npm ci 14 - npx nx-cloud start-agent 15 16pipelines: 17 pull-requests: 18 '**': 19 - parallel: 20 - step: 21 name: CI 22 script: 23 - export NX_BRANCH=$BITBUCKET_PR_ID 24 25 - npm ci 26 - npx nx-cloud start-ci-run --stop-agents-after="build" --agent-count=3 27 - npx nx-cloud record -- npx nx format:check 28 - npx nx affected --target=lint,test,build --parallel=2 29 - step: *agent 30 - step: *agent 31 - step: *agent 32

This configuration is setting up two types of jobs - a main job and three agent jobs.

The main job tells Nx Cloud to use DTE and then runs normal Nx commands as if this were a single pipeline set up. Once the commands are done, it notifies Nx Cloud to stop the agent jobs.

The agent jobs set up the repo and then wait for Nx Cloud to assign them tasks.

Two Types of Parallelization

The agents and the --parallel flag both parallelize tasks, but in different ways. The way this workflow is written, there will be 3 agents running tasks and each agent will try to run 2 tasks at once. If a particular CI run only has 2 tasks, only one agent will be used.