Setup a cloud access token for NX in a secure way

[heath-freenome]

The cloud caches the build and in later builds, only the parts that are affected are built. Since it's free for open-source I think we can make use of it.
Though you're correct. See here for access tokens. To pass the access token as an environment variable for CI workflow, you can set NX_CLOUD_ACCESS_TOKEN in secrets. But it doesn't matter at the moment because only a few people have write access to the source code. But please consider creating an Nx Cloud account and passing the token so that we can make use of it.
If you're still not sure, you can remove the token and it will disable the cloud for the time being.

@epicfaace Can you look into setting up the account to enable this?

Originally posted by @ahkhanjani in #2998 (comment)

[epicfaace]

@ahkhanjani is it possible for you to run some tests and give some estimates as to how much time we'd save on builds by using NX cloud (versus not using the caching and just using GHA)?

[ahkhanjani]

@ahkhanjani is it possible for you to run some tests and give some estimates as to how much time we'd save on builds by using NX cloud (versus not using the caching and just using GHA)?

I'm working on it. Though I can only run the tests locally. The time can differ on a cloud

[ahkhanjani]

@epicfaace @heath-freenome The numbers are not persistent but you can see the pattern:

Mode	Build 1	Build 2	Build 3
Raw Build	8m 56.66s	3m 21.845s	2m 46.683s
Nx Cache	16.885s	3.754s	6.035s

The first raw build may have been cached somewhere so it affected the rest. I made sure to clear local cache using the command line.

See current build times here. These are GHA builds for this PR. You can see the time saved. But you should reserve the access token and manage permissions,

Note that this method builds everything even if they have no changed whatsoever. Nx has an --affected flag that only runs commands on the changed code. This needs further configuration that I can take care of.

[heath-freenome]

@epicfaace Any chance you want to set this up? Or should we just close it?

[epicfaace]

Hey @heath-freenome I can help set this up but not sure what the process looks like? Does NX have a special open source program?

[heath-freenome]

I'm not sure... Maybe @nickgros knows since he did the Nx coversion

[nickgros]

I think the build has gotten a lot more stable, and it doesn't take very long to build on modern hardware, so I think we're fine without cloud caching.