Master Command Orchestration with Justfile
Introducing Just
This content is also available as an interactive workshop on killercoda.com
It's like a Makefile just better
Every project needs to orchestrate commands; whether for testing, building, creating components, infrastructure and many many more. This is typically done via a Makefile or bash scripts. The problem with make is that it is designed as a tool to *build_C source code, it _can* run commands but that's not its purpose. This means that when using Makefile we take on the whole unnecessary baggage of the build part.
Bash scripts are a bit better but after a while when more scripts are created, managing them and their dependencies becomes a nightmare.
There is a tool that combines best of both worlds; just is similar to make, but focused on commands orchestration.
Installation
Next we will install just and set up a simple justfile to see how it works.
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://just.systems/install.sh \
| bash -s -- --to /usr/local/bin
We can confirm that the installation was succesfull by running
just --version