Nx 17 Upgrade Errors - Cannot Use Import outside a Module

Upgrading Nx

The team over at Nx has made it super easy to upgrade your monorepo with a single line command that stages any package migrations for you, and let's you see all changes on a working tree. This approach is very nice if you are in a larger project and want to upgrade 1 or 2 major versions (my project was on Nx 15 and I moved to Nx 17).

In order to upgrade your monorepo, you can run this command:

nx migrate <version>

Or if you want to migrate all the way to latest (at your own risk) then you can just throw your hands up and run this command:

nx migrate latest

Once that is done, it will show you a message kind of like this:

Then you will want to rerun yarn or npm i or whatever you prefer to install the latest packages, then run

nx migrate --run-migrations

If everything goes to their plan, your migration will be successful and you can move on!

If you have any sort of local generators configured via plug-ins with Nx, then read on.

Cannot use import outside a module

Ah so this error is one that I dealt with for quite a while. There's a few github issues for this, but the one I participated in the most was this one.

The Problem

There is a package that gets updated with the nrwl/nx migrations called @swc-node/register any version in the 1.5.x range and the 1.6.x range breaks something inside of the nx internals that I haven't quite figured out why it happened. 1.5.x throws a completely different error than 1.6.x and 1.6.x just hard fails with the error above, 1.5.x throws an error like this:

The Solution (As of right now October 25, 2023)

Install an earlier version of @swc-node/register to make their generators work (at the time of writing this article).

With Yarn:

yarn add -D @swc-node/register@1.4.2 -W

With Npm:

npm i -D @swc-node/register@1.4.2

Note:

Installing @swc-node/register@1.4.2 with NPM requires --force because of peerDependency conflicts:

See here for more.

myngapp git:(nx-16-10-0) ✗ npm i --force
npm WARN using --force Recommended protections disabled.
npm WARN ERESOLVE overriding peer dependency
npm WARN While resolving: nx@16.10.0
npm WARN Found: @swc-node/register@1.4.2
npm WARN node_modules/@swc-node/register
npm WARN   dev @swc-node/register@"1.4.2" from the root project
npm WARN 
npm WARN Could not resolve dependency:
npm WARN peerOptional @swc-node/register@"^1.6.7" from nx@16.10.0
npm WARN node_modules/nx
npm WARN   dev nx@"16.10.0" from the root project
npm WARN   3 more (@nx/devkit, @nx/workspace, @nrwl/tao)
npm WARN 
npm WARN Conflicting peer dependency: @swc-node/register@1.6.8
npm WARN node_modules/@swc-node/register
npm WARN   peerOptional @swc-node/register@"^1.6.7" from nx@16.10.0
npm WARN   node_modules/nx
npm WARN     dev nx@"16.10.0" from the root project
npm WARN     3 more (@nx/devkit, @nx/workspace, @nrwl/tao)

Run your generators and you should be greeted with a happy response now.