Programmatic control

[givenergy-dexter]

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

Description

As described in #4341 it would be great to be able to programmatically control NX. Obviously the source code for the functions much exist somewhere – it may be the case they just need exposing.

Motivation

We're looking to create a yargs CLI wrapper around our monorepo. We're currently looking at having to use Node's spawn functionality to trigger nx commands programmatically during a wrapped command.

Suggested Implementation

It would be great to expose each function when installing and attempting to import nx through a Node file, for example:

const nx = require('nx')

async function main() {
  await nx.generate('<template>', '<project-name>')
}

Alternate Implementations

Rather than having arguments for each underlying option it may be worth providing an object which can be automatically generated and mapped if needed

const nx = require('nx')

async function main() {
  await nx.generate({ template: '<template>', project: '<project-name>' })
}

[FrozenPandaz]

I've converted this to a discussion so it can be discussed more.

The example of running generators programmatically is actually better done by composing generators.

Are there other use cases which you want a programmatic API for?