Exclude folders from project detection

[unional]

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

Description

Provide a way to exclude folders from project detection.

Motivation

Currently I'm getting these errors:

>  NX   The following projects are defined in multiple locations:

   - storybook-static: 
     - packages/pkg-1/storybook-static
     - packages/pkg-2/storybook-static

This is because there is a project.json under storybook-static, which is generated by storybook for its own use.

nx saw that file and assume it is nx's project.json.

.nxignore is only used for input/affected detection and does not help in this case.

Suggested Implementation

The most user friendly way is to respect the workspace/pnpm-workspace/lerna config and don't reach in to look for any project.json. i.e. consider this as a bug instead of a feature.

Alternate Implementations

Allow user to use .nxignore to exclude folder for this purpose.

[K3TH3R]

I'm seeing the same thing with a selection of files that we deep copy with Vite from a third party library into our public assets folder. One of the folders has a package.json inside of it which is being picked up by NX and breaking our builds even though it's not defined as a project.

[danielritter]

I have the same issue that looks like:

Error: The following projects are defined in multiple locations:
4.255 - @core/application:
4.255   - .nx/tmp/681210077380676172/outputs/dist/libs/core/application
4.255   - dist/libs/core/application
4.255 - @core/common:
4.255   - .nx/tmp/12506113542676405020/outputs/dist/libs/core/common
4.255   - dist/libs/core/common
...

My cacheDirectory in nx.json looks like: "cacheDirectory": ".nx/tmp",

[AgentEnder]

Nx automatically excludes directories which are gitignored, which I'd expect both your cache dir and dist to be.

For plugins configured in nx.json, you can exclude config globs like so:

plugins: [{ plugin: 'myPlugin', exclude: ['libs'] }]

would configure myPlugin to ignore config files in libs dir

[unional]

I'm not using any plugins. In my case, those folders are .gitignore in the respective package, not in the root's .gitignore.

[danielritter]

@AgentEnder Good to know, thanks! I really had only a .gitignore file one folder above of my root and not in the root itself. But that didn't solve my problem. I updated yesterday to the newest nx version. That fixed the problem at the moment. Thanks!

[velomad]

i am not yet able to solve this issue

[vasyhin]

in my case I'm deploying firebase functions project. And it contains package.json when builds into ./dist/apps/ And I got similar error

The following projects are defined in multiple locations:
2024-04-27T19:01:31.7584481Z 
2024-04-27T19:01:31.7586404Z - <REDACTED>: 
2024-04-27T19:01:31.7586741Z   - apps/<REDACTED>
2024-04-27T19:01:31.7587318Z   - dist/apps/<REDACTED>
2024-04-27T19:01:31.7602507Z 
2024-04-27T19:01:31.7603472Z To fix this, set a unique name for each project in a project.json inside the project's root. If the project does not currently have a project.json, you can create one that contains only a name.

To fix that I just created a fake project.json file in ./dist/apps/ with fake project name

cat << EOF > ./dist/apps/<REDACTED>/project.json
{
  "name": "fake-project-name"
}
EOF