input?

[amonks]

Tasks can't take any input. Not flags, not stdin, not nothin else besides. One dogfoody use case for this would be a tag-and-release script for Run, which would require specifying a version identifier somehow.

"not run's purview" is a reasonable answer.

"tasks can declare structured inputs, which the UI can handle appropriately" might be a fun answer

[ecshreve]

i've used this tool in the past and found the ability to pass cli args in willy-nilly useful on occasion. hypothetically maybe i want to wrap some npm scripts with run tasks so they can be part of a dependency tree, but maybe i also want to run them individually for whatever reason and pass --verbose along

[amonks]

I like in that example that the inputs are just flags, that's easy to understand

I'm not sure about just having a single CLI_ARGS variable tho; it seems like you might want more control in systems with a lot of tasks: if you're building up a task set from many task files spread out over a codebase, I don't think you should have to think about all of the tasks and whether they'll respond the right way to your flag

something like --set=task:key:val seems maximally specific,

run dev --set=jsbuild:verbose:true --set=cssbuild:verbose:false

and then

cmd="something --verbose=$verbose"

…but that's a lot to type

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my other train of thought here is kind of inspired by terraform "inputs", where a task can declare some inputs, and you can pass them as flags, but also we render a fun interactive form for any missing inputs

[ecshreve]

oh i'm a big fan of that tf-esque idea. love setting defaults and overriding later as needed.

ansible does some interesting things along these lines with variables where you can assign values to variables in a number of places (in a task / play / playbook, at cli, env vars, vars file...) and then at execution time the value is chosen based on a heirarchy, (ie cli args will always override any other assignments, definitions in vars.yml will always be overridden, etc.)

[cgsdev0]

run dev --set=jsbuild:verbose:true --set=cssbuild:verbose:false

i think this might not be the best solution, since some programs use different (albeit inferior) styles of flags (go programs come to mind)

separately but also related to inputs, i would love to be able to set environment variables for tasks

[amonks]

@cgsdev0 ah, sorry, I wasn't clear; I was thinking of combining that with template in the cmd

id = "jsbuild"
cmd = "do-something {{ if verbose == "true" }}--verbose{{ end }}"

run dev --set=jsbuild:verbose:true

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env is a great idea and shippable; all for it; created #69 (nice)

[amonks]

probably more than half of my "cmd"s are multiline scripts, so I don't think a solution without some kind of explicit templating is viable