Alfons 5

Alfons 5 is a rewrite of the original Alfons, written to be much more modular and usable. For the old Alfons 3, see the three GitHub branch.

Alfons is a task runner to help you manage your project. It's inspired by the worst use cases of Make (this means using make instead of shell scripts), it will read an Alfonsfile, extract the exported functions and run the tasks in order. I would tell you that there is no real reason to use this thing, but it's becoming surprisingly useful, so actually try it out.

[!TIP] Check out the 5.2 update! Shell autocompletions, help messages, Taskfile documentations and extra environment functions have been added.

Table of contents

• Alfons 5
  • Table of contents
  • Changelog
  • 5.2
  • 5
  • 4.4
  • 4.3
  • 4.2
  • 4.1
  • Usage
  • Defining tasks
  • Calling tasks
  • Arguments
  • Migrating from Alfons 3
    • Missing functions
    • Importable tasks
  • Installing
  • Extra features
  • Projects using Alfons
  • License
  • Goodbye?

Changelog

5.2

• 5.2 (08.06.2024) Implemented Taskfile documentation, help messages and autocompletion

• Taskfile documentation. You can now document your Taskfiles for automatic help messages and shell completion.

  • Check the documentation for more info.

• Help messages. You can now display a help message with --help, or even get help for a specific task with --help [task].

  • This help message can be automatically generated from the detected tasks in the Taskfile.
  • It works best when you document your Taskfile, so you can add descriptions and options.

• Shell autocompletion. Shell autocompletion is now available in Zsh, Bash and Fish flavors.

  • The Zsh and Fish flavors are by far the most complete, since Zsh's and Fish's completion systems are slightly more capable.
  • Bash is only able to list tasks, and sometimes options or flags for those tasks. Use Zsh.
  • Check the documentation for more info and install instructions.

• Additions to the environment.

  • lines: Split a string into lines
  • split: Split any string by any pattern
  • sanitize: Neutralizes pattern magic characters in strings
  • keys: Get the keys of a table as an array
  • slice: Creates a slice of an array
  • map, reduce, filter do to arrays what you would expect
  • contains has been rewritten

    5

• 5.0.2 (23.01.2023) Rolled back test mode

• 5.0.1 (23.01.2023) Fixed rockspec dependencies

• 5.0 (23.01.2023) Switched out filekit in favor of lpath.

I am back to life and filekit errored on me. Filekit is terribly inefficient anyway and I don't know why I ever made it. Now I am using an actually good filesystem library. It's a breaking change, though.

• Compatibility with ComputerCraft has been removed. Alfons 5 is not compatible with it.
• Replaced filekit with lpath
  • fs in the environment no longer points to filekit, but to path.fs
  • path, fsinfo and env have been added to the environment, corresponding to path, path.info and path.env respectively.
• Additions to the environment
  • safeOpen: Open IO handles safely
  • listAll: Returns a list of all files and directories recursively.
  • copy: Recursive file copy
  • delete: Recursive delete
  • isEmpty: Checks if a directory is empty
• Changes to the environment
  • All FS operations don't deal in absolute paths anymore
  • wildcard and iwildcard may exhibit slightly different behavior.

4.4

• 4.4 (04.02.2021) Added exists and Experimental Teal Support.

Some critical bugs in the loading of taskfiles and the invocation of tasks have been fixed.

4.3

• 4.3 (26.01.2021) Added calls and npairs.

4.2

• 4.2 (02.10.2020) Internal overhaul.

Alfons 4.2 changes the whole way that Alfons works on the inside. Please refer to Loading and API for the most notable work.

4.1

• 4.1.4 (12.09.2020) - Bugfix on default task.
• 4.1.3 (11.09.2020) - Funny Homestuck Number update. Fix inotify dependency.
• 4.1.2 (29.08.2020) - More bugfixes
• 4.1.1 (27.08.2020) - Bugfixes
• 4.1 (27.08.2020) - Added uses

Usage

Run alfons in a directory with an Alfons.lua or Alfons.moon file. Using MoonScript (obviously) requires installing MoonScript via LuaRocks.

To see the documentation, check out the docs/ folder of this repo.

To get started using Alfons, check out the Tutorial or the Recipes.

Defining tasks

Tasks are obtained by either returning a table {tasks={}} where the empty table is a list of named functions, or by exporting globals. The preferred mode for Lua is exporting globals, and the preferred mode for MoonScript is returning a table, although both work in both languages.

Lua:

-- Exporting globals
function always(self) print(self.name) end
-- Returning table
return { tasks = {
  always = function(self) print(self.name) end
}}

MoonScript

-- Exporting globals
export always ==> print @name
-- Returning table
tasks:
  always: => @name

Calling tasks

From the command line, simply pass the name of the task you wish to run. Alternatively, use tasks.TASK to call TASK if it's loaded.

Lua:

function test (self)
  print("I am " .. self.name .. " and " .. self.caller .. " called me.")
end

function call (self)
  tasks.test{caller = self.name}
end

MoonScript:

tasks:
  test: => print "I am #{@name} and #{@caller} called me."
  call: => tasks.test caller: @name

Arguments

Arguments are passed in the self table of every function, which contains a field called name which is, well, uh, its own name. You can also use the args table to see the whole tree of arguments. Feel free to play with and abuse this!

Migrating from Alfons 3

Some functions are either not implemented or not yet ported.

Missing functions

moonc, git, clone and toflags do not exist anymore. The first three may be implemented at a later time, and the last won't be implemented due to the changes in Alfons' argument system. For now, you will have to use their command-line counterparts, so moonc file becomes sh "moonc #{file}" and such.

Importable tasks

fetch/fetchs is now just fetch, and ms-compile has been removed and will probably not come back. Write a compile task manually. This should work as a dropin replacement:

Lua:

compile = function()
  for file in wildcard "**.moon" do sh "moonc ".. file end
end

MoonScript:

compile: => sh "moonc #{file}" for file in wildcard "**.moon"

Installing

Since this is not upstream yet, you can't install through the LuaRocks server. However, you can install Alfons using itself.

Alfons 4 is now available on LuaRocks!

$ luarocks install alfons

Extra features

The preincluded task fetch depends on lua-http to be used. The watch function depends on linotify and will not work on platforms other than Linux.

$ luarocks install http     # lua-http
$ luarocks install inotify  # linotify

Projects using Alfons

• Moonbuild by the one and only Codinget
• awlua by Le0Developer
• VNDS-LOVE by ajusa

Thanks for using the project \<3.

License

Throwing it to the public domain. Check out the license.

Goodbye?

goodbye.