feat: ✨ Creating @nx/angular:esbuild-dev-server - Incremental build dev server for esbuild with Angular 17

[bjornharvold]

Description

With the introduction of Angular 17 and the new default builder: @angular-devkit/build-angular:application, we no longer have an incremental serve story with Nx. If you try to use the webpack-dev-server, you'll see the error:

NX The applicationandbrowser-esbuild builders do not support Webpack transforms.

Motivation

When using the new esbuild feature from Angular 17 and TailwindCss, it takes us 500+ seconds to start up a large application. When we make a simple code change, it takes 280+ seconds for esbuild to rebuild.

The esbuild build story is GREAT. Working with esbuild and TailwindCSS on a daily basis is a completely different story.

Wondering what's possible here. The current situation is not currently tenable.

Thoughts from the great Nx Team highly requested 🍺
Bjorn

[JelleBruisten]

After updating to nx 17/17.1, I'm running into related problem:
Cannot find builder 'browser-esbuild' in ...node_modules\@nx\angular\executors.json..

Before we were using the webpack builder, we found that the webpack builder runs into memory problems in our azure pipeline ( a feature branch regarding a large feature, that is due to be moved to the main branch soon ). This problem seemed to have been resolved with using the browser-esbuild however after upgrading to nx 17/17.1 we are not able to serve our application locally anymore. Therefore upgrading is not a option at this moment.

We're using the executor for serving:
@angular-devkit/build-angular:dev-server for serving

And for building the following executor is used:
@nx/angular:browser-esbuild

The building works, we also can deploy it and works fine, but it won't work for local development. This prevents us from upgrading nx and angular to the latest versions.

Having a incremental build dev server for esbuild would likely resolve this issue

[leosvelperez]

@JelleBruisten that's a separate issue that has already been fixed by #20307 (though it hasn't been released yet). The issue reported in this thread will be addressed by #20311.

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