Incorrect "circular dependency" error on 20.1.0

[simon-abbott]

Current Behavior

Running certain commands on nx 20.1.0 gives a "Could not execute command because the task graph has a circular dependency" error, even though there aren't actually any circular dependencies.

Expected Behavior

Running nx commands should complete successfully.

GitHub Repo

No response

Steps to Reproduce

As best as I can tell these are the reproduction steps:

1. Run nx reset
2. Run a cachable command that depends on other packages (I'm using npx nx run-many --target=build --all where build has "dependsOn": ["^build"]).
3. Run nx reset again, leaving the build outputs alone
4. Run build again.

On the second invocation of build with a clean cache and existing outputs it will falsely think there is a circular dependency. Also when trying to make a minimal repro of this issue I found that it stops happening for me if I remove the files in .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATES. Which is exceedingly strange. I unfortunately haven't yet found a full minimal reproduction, but I can consistently reproduce it locally in our full (private) workspace.

Here is the script I ran that reliably reproduced the issue:

#!/bin/bash

set -e

npx nx run-many --target=clean --all
npx nx reset
npm install
npx nx run-many --target=build --all
npx nx reset
npx nx run-many --target=build --all

Nx Report

Node           : 22.12.0
OS             : darwin-x64
Native Target  : x86_64-macos
npm            : 10.9.0

nx             : 20.1.0
@nx/js         : 20.1.0
@nx/workspace  : 20.1.0
@nx/devkit     : 20.1.0
typescript     : 5.5.4

Failure Logs

Package Manager Version

No response

Operating System

• macOS
• Linux
• Windows
• Other (Please specify)

Additional Information

I bisected the nx version and v20.1.0 is the first release with this issue.

I also tried to debug this locally by cloning the nx repo, but I was unable to figure out how to run the locally-built nx on the failing project. If you can provide instructions on how to make that work I'd be happy to look into this further myself.