Nx CLI and Access Tokens

The permissions and membership define what developers can access on Nx Cloud. They don't affect what happens when you run Nx commands locally or on CI. To manage that, you need to provision access tokens. To do that, go to Workspace Options / Manage Access Tokens.

Types of Access Tokens

Use Caution With Read-Write Tokens

Read-write tokens allow full write access to your remote cache. They should only be used in trusted environments. For instance, open source projects should only use read-write tokens as secrets configured for protected branches (e.g, main). Read-only tokens should be used in all other cases.

There are currently two (2) types of Access Tokens for Nx Cloud's runner that you can use on your workspace. Both tokens support distributed task execution and allow Nx Cloud to store metadata about runs.

  • read-only
  • read-write

Access Tokens: Read Only

The read-only access tokens will only read from the remote cache. Task results will not be stored in the remote cache for other developers to use.

Access Tokens: Read & Write

The read-write access tokens allows task results to be stored in the remote cache for other developers to download and replay on their machines.

Setting Access Tokens

Let's see how access tokens work.

If you open your nx.json, you will see something like this:

1{ 2 "nxCloudAccessToken": "SOMETOKEN" 3} 4

If you remove the nxCloudAccessToken or accessToken property from the configuration, the runner will run all commands as if you were not connected to Nx Cloud. This essentially turns off Nx Cloud.

Setting a Different Access Token in CI

You can also configure the access token by setting the NX_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable. NX_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN takes precedence over the accessToken property. It's common to have a read-only token stored in nx.json and a read-write token set via NX_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN in CI.

Using nx-cloud.env

You can set an environment variable locally via the nx-cloud.env file. Nx Cloud CLI will look in this file to load custom configuration like NX_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN. These environment variables will take precedence over the configuration in nx.json.