expand scope of allowable fields for targetDefaults

[seansfkelley]

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

Description

Judging by the schema, targetDefaults only permits inputs, outputs, and dependsOn fields. A project's target can additionally include executor, options, and configurations.

I would like to be able to define at least executor in targetDefaults, if not also the other fields.

Motivation

I have a monorepo of 100+ packages, 90+ of which have the exact same configurations for builds. I can already DRY up the task dependencies using something like

"targetDefaults": {
  "build": {
    "inputs": ["default"],
    "dependsOn": ["^build", "transpile", "type-check"]
  },
},

but I still have to specify the same executor for the build target in 90+ packages.

Suggested Implementation

Since executor is a simple string, there's no complexity w/r/t override semantics: take the target's if present, and take targetDefault's otherwise.

options and configurations are a little trickier. For consistency with dependsOn and greater flexibility, at the cost of losing DRYness, I would say options specified in the project.json overwrite instead of merging with those from nx.json. Same for configurations, except the overriding happens per-named-configuration, rather than for configurations on the whole.

Alternate Implementations

options and each configuration could merge instead of override, but this has a lot of tricky semantics and is probably not appropriate for a first version of the feature. (Off the top of my head, two things: how do you unset fields, and is it a recursive merge, or a shallow one?)

[AgentEnder]

Hey @seansfkelley! This is something that we are currently thinking through and will be added in the future.

[github-actions]

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