Dependency Checks rule

The @nx/dependency-checks ESLint rule enables you to discover mismatches between dependencies specified in a project's package.json and the dependencies that your project depends on. If your project is using, for example, the axios, but the package.json does not specify it as a dependency, your library might not work correctly. This rule helps catch these problems before your users do.

The rule uses the project graph to collect all the dependencies of your project, based on the input of your build target. It will filter out all the dependencies marked as devDependencies in your root package.json to ensure dependencies of your compilation pipelines (e.g. dependencies of webpack.config or vite.config) or test setups are not included in the expected list.

We use the version numbers of the installed packages when checking whether the version specifier in package.json is correct. We do this because this is the only version for which we can "guarantee" that things work and were tested. If you specify a range outside of that version, that would mean that you are shipping potentially untested code.

Usage

You can use the dependency-checks rule by adding it to your ESLint rules configuration:

.eslintrc.json
{
  // ... more ESLint config here
  "overrides": [
    {
      "files": ["*.json"],
      "parser": "jsonc-eslint-parser",
      "rules": {
        "@nx/dependency-checks": "error"
      }
    }
    // ... more ESLint overrides here
  ]
}
Nx 15 and lower use @nrwl/ instead of @nx/

Linting JSON files is not enabled by default, so you will also need to add package.json to the lintFilePatterns:

project.json
{
  // ... project.json config
  "targets": {
    // ... more targets
    "lint": {
      "executor": "@nx/linter:eslint",
      "outputs": ["{options.outputFile}"],
      "options": {
        "lintFilePatterns": [
          "libs/my-lib/**/*.{ts,tsx,js,jsx}",
          "libs/my-lib/package.json" // add this line
        ]
      }
    }
  }
}
Nx 15 and lower use @nrwl/ instead of @nx/

Sometimes we intentionally want to add or remove a dependency from our package.json despite what the rule suggests. We can use the rule's options to override default behavior:

.eslintrc.json
{
  "@nx/dependency-checks": [
    "error",
    {
      // for available options check below
    }
  ]
}
Nx 15 and lower use @nrwl/ instead of @nx/

Options

Property	Type	Default	Description
buildTargets	Array<string>	["build"]	List of build target names
ignoredDependencies	Array<string>	[]	List of dependencies to ignore for checks
checkMissingDependencies	boolean	true	Disable to skip checking for missing dependencies
checkObsoleteDependencies	boolean	true	Disable to skip checking for unused dependencies
checkVersionMismatches	boolean	true	Disable to skip checking if version specifier matches installed version