/amm-task-runner

Primary LanguageScala

This is a poor-man rake alternative for scala scripts (ammonite).

Getting started

  • download 2 files TaskRunner.sc and tasks.sc to wherever desired, for example to a project dir
  • edit tasks.sc to add the real tasks. It's very similar to Rakefile, so if you know rake you will feel right at home.

Usage example

amm tasks.sc # list available tasks and description
amm tasks.sc abc # run task `abc`
amm tasks.sc abc a_arg_def=123 # run task `abc` with argument

Why?

I use rake as entry point for almost anything that requires running a command in terminal. It serves as a task runner, and also as some minimal documentation. In the simplest case the Rakefile looks like this:

require "#{Dir.home}/helpers/rake-utils.rb"
desc 'do something'
task 'abc' do |task|
  log task
  sh "echo Hello"
end

which is obviously more verbose than just echo Hello, however it has some great benefits:

  • I don't have to remember the exact command; just run rake to get started
  • running rake without arguments will show all available tasks with description like this:
rake
rake ls  # list available tasks
rake abc # do something
  • auto-completion works well for rake, so I can just type rake a<Tab> and it's faster than typing echo Hello

I like this approach so much that I miss it badly when I have some projects in scala script. I can use rake there, but it feels so wrong. So I made this simple project to scratch my own itch.