gu

Experimental task runner, inspired by the Guardian’s ergonomic but unorthodox use of makefiles.

The idea is to standardise how and where you define project tasks, by making them:

1. easy to discover
2. simple to run
3. flexible to write

It’s inspired by a lot of prior art, especially GitHub’s Scripts To Rule Them All.

N.B. while gu is only intended to be used by humans (and not by CI systems etc), it’s designed to encourage a style of writing tasks that also makes them simple to run in CI.

Screenshot

Installation

For now, you’ll need to install gu using Deno. See deno.land if you need to install Deno as well.

deno install --allow-read --allow-run https://deno.land/x/gu_cli/gu.ts

Usage

gu <task> [<task> ...] [-- args...]

Examples

gu test

You can run multiple tasks:

gu test lint # will be run serially, in order

You can pass arguments to individual tasks by quoting them:

gu test 'lint --cache'

You can pass arguments to all tasks by passing them after --:

gu test lint -- --cache

Tasks can also be globs:

gu 'build-*' # run all tasks in ./scripts/ that start with "build-"
gu '**/test' # run all 'test' tasks in ./scripts/, including subdirectories
gu '**/*'    # run all tasks in ./scripts

Helpers

gu comes with some built in helpers that can be used in your tasks.

--verify-node

Ensure the correct version of Node is being used (based on .nvmrc).

More to come…

Flags

--list, -l

List all available tasks in the current directory.

--help, -h

Show help.

--version, -v

Show the version number.

Tasks

Tasks are any executable files that live in the ./scripts directory.

Note that file extensions are ignored by gu, so having both lint.rb and lint.mjs would throw an error.

Example

.scripts/
├── build.mjs #!/usr/bin/env node
├── lint      #!/usr/bin/env ruby
└── test      #!/usr/bin/env bash

Now you can run:

gu lint test build

Special Tasks

Gu will also run any relevant before-*/after-* scripts it finds in ./scripts/.gu/.

For example, if you run gu build, it will try to run the following:

1. ./scripts/.gu/before-all
2. ./scripts/.gu/before-build
3. ./scripts/build
4. ./scripts/.gu/after-build
5. ./scripts/.gu/after-all

These can be useful to set up your environment before running a task, or to clean up afterwards etc.

Development

You will need Deno. See deno.land for more information.

While developing, you can install gu from disk by running:

deno install --allow-read --allow-run gu.ts

Now running gu will use your local copy.

Building

To build gu, run the project’s build script using gu itself:

./gu.ts build