Just

Previous versions of my project layout suggested putting everything into a //scripts/ folder and adding that to the path using the project setup.

For the most part, that worked but I found it cumbersome after about a year. The scripts had to have extensions and I found myself obsessing about the logging prefixes to make things “pretty” even to go as far as to write a program to write a standard boilerplate for scripts to produce logging.

Realizing that I was losing the tree in the middle of the forest, I found another utility that did most of what I was looking for, was not maintained by me, and had cross-platform support: Just.

just is a pretty solid program, with the ability to have a chooser when one doesn't know the application, can chain commands together, and has the ability to pull in things like the .env file if present or chain to other just files.

The tool also has good online documentation and there is also a wonderful cheat sheet that is good for referencing.

Boilerplate

That isn't to say I don't have a standard boilerplate when it comes to just files. The main part is to make sure that running just by itself gives some form of documentation or possibility of what can be done. Since the bulk of the use of this is via a user console window, I use the “choose” command and put the following stanza at top:

set dotenv-load

_default:
    just --choose

Detailed Targets

For the most part, I'll set up a target such as build but there are times when I only want to run a specific part of the build, such as only building the JavaScript assets or only generating files. In those cases, I prefix a more detailed target with the name of the general one and then have the general call that.

build: build-client build-server

build-client:
  # Do stuff

build-server:
  # Do stuff

Imports

I like my files to be small and readable, usually a hundred lines or less. With some projects, such as Rust or Python, it can get longer, but I still want to break that into different files.

In Just, I use the import command to pull files from the //src/just directory.

import 'src/just/build.just'

build: build-client build-server

Common Targets

The most common targets I set up are:

setup

Since I use CI servers for most of my work, I use the setup target to download assets, install SSH keys, or install NPM packages. In most cases, I look for the presence of those files or directory to avoid doing the work excessively (and it avoid blowing away my SSH keys on accident).

build

Pretty much the most common target I'll create and use, build will build the project. In many cases, it will run setup first.

deploy

I use for projects that need to be deployed, like websites.

release

The release target is for pushing up packages or doing the release process. These are the targets that would do semantic releases based on conventional commits.

clean

This is also a common task I use, clean basically wipes out the folder and gets rid of directories like node_modules/ (for NPM) or target/ (for Rust projects). In most cases, I also have a clean-purge that does a git -xfd but ignores things like my .env file to avoid blowing away my environment.

test

Performs any tests on the project.

format

I use code formatting a lot. In many cases, it is a dependency on build to ensure everything is consistent.