How to move a single app to a separate new repository?

[MaurizioCasciano]

Let's consider an NX workspace with different apps
A, B, C
and libs
LA, LB, LC, Shared,
belonging to the private App-Mono git repository.

I am looking for the best way to opensource a subset of the monorepo, App-C, to the community.

1. How can we move the app C, together with LC and Shared libs (and the other dependencies, e.g. package.json)
   to a separate/open-source git repository? Maybe keeping the NX Workspace configuration, but just for that particular app and its dependencies.

2. How to have this new repository linked with the original monorepo repository in order to easily merge back and forth the new commits from/to the community?

A possible approach I did find is to use the Git Filter-Repo command
in order to create a new repository with only the needed files, but maybe there is another way to do it.

[AndriiTsok]

@MaurizioCasciano Google has a very handy tool for that https://github.com/google/copybara

Would be great to hear if NX has any capabilities for a proper moving of an app out of a monorepo.

[MaurizioCasciano]

Thank you @AndriiTsok, do you use it with NX or do you have a tutorial?
I will surely investigate more on it.
I hope that the NX team could automate this feature.

[AndriiTsok]

@MaurizioCasciano nope, we do not have this set up yet. But we are also planning to open source some apps from our big monorepo.

[MaurizioCasciano]

Maybe creating a new branch and running a set of @nrwl/workspace:remove commands could be enough to have a new workspace with a single app and some libs.
https://nx.dev/l/a/workspace/remove

If all the commands are in a bash script then it would be just a matter of running a single command npm run extract:app-C delegating to the bash script.

What do you think?

@FrozenPandaz @vsavkin
Would it be possible to list all the dependencies of e.g the App C and remove only the other projects not used by the App C in a single command, e.g @nrwl/workspace:extract?

[JulieMarie]

@MaurizioCasciano Were you able to accomplish this? Either by using copybara or by another way?

[MaurizioCasciano]

@JulieMarie as a quick solution I am creating a my-project-oss branch and running a set of
nx g @nrwl/workspace:remove <project-id> on it.
The problem is that you need to write a script manually with the apps and libs to be removed.
Maybe there is some command to list all the apps and the dependencies of a project so that it could be automated, but I didn't find it.
Do you know if/how it is possible to list all the apps of a nx-workspace, and the dependencies projects of an app?

[IlanSapiens]

Hi MaurizioCasciano did you find solution or got progress with that?