Allow to specify the workspace path in CLI argument

[yannickglt]

Nx computing cache improved a lot our CI build times. Thanks for that 😍.

Now, the most of the build time is occupied by NPM dependencies installation and Ngcc build.
To solve this, we decided to cache the node_modules folder and create symbolic links onto builds with same dependencies.

However, the Nx cli cannot be run through linked node_modules currently as it uses __dirname to retrieve the local workspace.

Using process.cwd() instead of __dirname makes the cli work and the whole CI build success. By the way, maybe an environment variable or cli argument could do the job to precise the workspace path.

Expected Behavior

Run the nx.js binary from a symbolic linked node_modules directory.

Current Behavior

The workspace is not found because the use of __dirname which does not follow symbol links.

Steps to Reproduce

mkdir ../other-path
mv node_modules ../other-path
ln -s ../other-path/node_modules
./node_modules/.bin/nx print-affected

The command does not return anything because the workspace could not be found.

Context

Please provide any relevant information about your setup:

❯ nx report

>  NX  Report complete - copy this into the issue template

  @nrwl/angular : 9.2.1
  @nrwl/cli : 9.0.4
  @nrwl/cypress : 9.2.1
  @nrwl/eslint-plugin-nx : Not Found
  @nrwl/express : Not Found
  @nrwl/jest : 9.2.1
  @nrwl/linter : 9.2.1
  @nrwl/nest : Not Found
  @nrwl/next : Not Found
  @nrwl/node : 9.2.1
  @nrwl/react : Not Found
  @nrwl/schematics : Not Found
  @nrwl/tao : 9.0.4
  @nrwl/web : Not Found
  @nrwl/workspace : 9.2.1
  typescript : 3.8.3

Thanks in advance

[anton-gorbikov]

We are having the exact issue. To speed up the build pipelines we wanted to cache docker image with node_modules pre-installed and share it among several CI jobs. And we've faced an issue that nx is not working with symbolic links, because of __dirname usage. __dirname returns the path where the actual node_modules are stored and nx is not able to find a workspace there.

[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

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