fix(core): preserve user-supplied nx.metadata in package.json projects

[wilcoxmd]

Current Behavior

User-supplied nx.metadata keys in a project's package.json are discarded by the package-json plugin. Given:

// apps/my-app/package.json
{
  "name": "my-app",
  "description": "my app",
  "nx": {
    "metadata": { "foo": "bar" }
  }
}

nx show project my-app --json | jq .metadata returns only { "targetGroups": {...}, "description": ... } — the foo key is gone.

The cause is in getMetadataFromPackageJson: the function destructures nx from packageJson but does not spread nx?.metadata into the returned object. That object then replaces (rather than merges with) the user's metadata when the plugin spreads it onto the project configuration in buildProjectConfigurationFromPackageJson.

This makes nx.metadata unusable as an extension point for user tooling that wants to attach annotations to projects via package.json.

Expected Behavior

User-supplied keys on nx.metadata are preserved alongside the auto-generated targetGroups and description. When a key collides, the user-supplied value wins.

After this change:

$ nx show project my-app --json | jq .metadata
{
  "targetGroups": { "NPM Scripts": [...] },
  "description": "...",
  "foo": "bar"
}

Related Issue(s)

N/A

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[AgentEnder]

We should probably use this util here:

nx/packages/nx/src/project-graph/utils/project-configuration/target-merging.ts

Line 49 in 5805c5f

export function mergeMetadata<T = ProjectMetadata | TargetMetadata>(

Its not gonna be super ergonomic, but invocation would be smth like

mergeMetadata(null,null,null,inferredMetadata,packageJson.nx?.metadata ?? {})

[wilcoxmd]

Oh, thanks for the pointer! Will update the change to use this!

[wilcoxmd]

@AgentEnder I updated the PR to use that util! I have the arguments ordered so that user-supplied keys will still take priority, which is a slightly different argument order than you shared. But if you ordered your example intentionally because you don't want user-specified keys to have priority then let me know and we can switch the args around.

[nx-cloud]

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☁️ Nx Cloud last updated this comment at 2026-04-30 01:02:14 UTC