just

Make is designed to track build dependencies, not to execute programs, so I think the problem is the choice of name. "just" is a utility designed to execute programs: https://github.com/casey/just#just

You might like justfiles[1]. They’re designed pretty much on this philosophy. `just` doesn’t have the ubiquitous availability of `make`, but I’ve found it’s much more user friendly for this use case, especially with the documentation features and ability for commands to accept arguments. [1] https://github.com/casey/just

I saw that the cost/benefit ratio of adopting https://github.com/casey/just in non-trivial projects was worth it as an alternative to bash scripts in script folders.

I have worked with Ansible for a few years in the industry and consequently I came to learn its dark side. For example, it has some of the most cryptic error messages I’ve ever experienced. At the time I first adopted it, HashiCorp’s offerings were not as open source as they are now, so I would recommend Hashi’s stuff as of today. However, I recently discovered “just” (https://github.com/casey/just) which is a good parity of ansible but minus the cumbersome YAML and the idempotent aspect which is mostly useless in practice for Ansible; so I would recommend taking a look at it and also consider aviary in tandem with Just (https://github.com/team-video/aviary.sh), together they are very simple and perfect for much of what one does with Ansible except for provisioning and orchestration which is where Hashi’s stuff comes into play.

Make was designed for building dependencies. I think it is always problematic to use it as a command runner (for example there is no standard way to list out the available commands). [just](https://github.com/casey/just) is a tool that feels similar to make but is designed explicitly for the purpose of running commands. I think of this as a simple CLI for your project workflow. You still really want to avoid putting code into a Justfile and put it into scripts. But the Justfile helps provide a slightly nicer UX and automatically invoke dependencies.

Hey! So this tool is something that I've wanted to build for a while now and it was a good opportunity to improve my Rust skills. It's inspired by a few other tools such as just [1] and maid [2]. The readme's faq section has some more background on why I wanted to build this. To summarize mask, it's a cli tool that looks for a maskfile.md in the current directory and parses it for commands. A maskfile.md is both a human-readable document and a simple command definition format. Tasks can be defined in sh, bash, zsh, fish, js, python, php, and ruby. Though it's not at v1.0 yet, I've been using it daily in personal projects and also as a global system utility for handy commands and automation tasks. Happy to answer any questions! [1]: https://github.com/casey/just [2]: https://github.com/egoist/maid