I’ve really enjoyed the just tool recently. (link)
I used to make a makefile at the root of each project I work on. This can be nice since it’s language agnostic: I don’t have to worry about distinguishing between cargo or npm, I can just run make test to test.
But I’ve kept my eyes open for something better and just has finally hit. My favorite features are:
• You can pass arguments to recipes from the command line:
just your-recipe arg1 arg2
• You can write recipes in any language, not just Make or Bash.
• You can specify a directory prefix to your target so just dir/test is the same as running cd dir && just test
• It’s just for running commands. Since make is a build system it caches output by default if there’s a file matching the target, giving the need to mark rules as .PHONY. just has no such requirement.
That’s all!