Working on projects, there are adhoc tasks that we need to run to complete a piece of work.
One place to describe these tasks is in the README. Then people wanting to try out the task, can just copy and paste the relevant command into a terminal.
Over time, people might create aliases, shortcuts or even simple shell
scripts for these. I am in the shell script and/or alias camp and had
tried using make previously, but could not get it to work in a
satisfactory manner.
But then I came across
just
which is a handy way to save and run project-specific commands. Inspired
by make, it allows one to specify recipes for these commands in a
justfile. Each recipe has
- a description,
- a name and
- the commands to run.
Here is a simple justfile with two simple tasks.
# Hello the world in 2025
hello:
echo hello world
# What is special about 2025
check-2025:
@echo "45² = 2025"
@echo "(1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³ ) = 2025"
@echo "(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025"
Running just --list will show the recipes that can be run:
$ just --list
Available recipes:
hello # Hello the world in 2025
check-2025 # What is special about 2025
Then running just check-2025 will run the recipe:
$ just check-2025
5² = 2025
(1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³ ) = 2025
(1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025
By default, running just without any parameters will run the first
recipe:
$ just
echo hello world
hello world
However just provides a way of specifying the default recipe to run. So a
common practice is to make the default recipe list the available tasks.
@_default:
just --list --unsorted
# Hello the world in 2025
hello:
echo hello world
# What is special about 2025
check-2025:
@echo "45² = 2025"
@echo "(0³+ 1³ + 2³ + 3³ + 4³ + 5³ + 6³ + 7³ + 8³ + 9³ ) = 2025"
@echo "(0 + 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9)² = 2025"
And running just now shows what can be done.
$ just
Available recipes:
hello # Hello the world in 2025
check-2025 # What is special about 2025
Some of the great things about the project are that it is cross-platform, is actively maintained and has pretty good documentation.