neomake

neomake is a fully open source task runner CLI utility that acts as a modern alternative to known utilities.

State

neomake is currently a pre-release and to be considered as unstable.

Features

• Task chains
  Execute many tasks in sequence, easily re-use single tasks using YAML anchors.
• Invocation matrix
  Invoke task chains many times by specifying multiple entries in a matrix that's used for parameterizing a seperate chain execution. This feature is heavily inspired by the GitLab pipeline's matrix builds.
• YAML
  No need for any fancy configuration formats or syntax. The entire configuration is done in an easy to understand yaml file, including support for features such as YAML anchors (and everything in the YAML 1.2 standard).

How to use

1. cargo install neomake
2. neomake init
3. neomake run -c test -a args.test="some argument"

Why

Why would someone build a task runner if there's many alternatives out there? A few of the most well known task running utilities / frameworks are (non exhaustive):

• make (Makefile) - the original as well as many different implementations
• Earthly (Earthfile) - executing tasks inside of containers
• pyinvoke (tasks.py) - executing tasks from within python scripts

I built this utility because all of the alternatives I have tried, including the ones listed above were lacking some features. I was basically looking for a subset of the functionality which the GitLab pipelines provide incl. features such as matrix builds and more. Especially things like invoking commands in many locations, parallelizing tasks, easy parameterization and a few more.