Basic

How to get started with Taskfile

Create your Taskfile

There are multiple ways to create a Taskfile.

Create a Taskfile in the current directory
Create a Taskfile in a specific directory
Create a Taskfile with a custom filename
Manually create a Taskfile


# This will create a Taskfile.yml in the current directory
task --init
 
# This will create a Taskfile.yml in the specified directory
# Make sure the directory exists
task --init ./directory-path
 
# This will create a custom Taskfile
task --init CustomTaskfile.yml
 
# Manually create a Taskfile
touch Taskfile.yml

Open the Taskfile in your favorite text editor.

The Taskfile will look like this:

Taskfile.yml


version: '3'
 
vars:
  GREETING: Hello, World!
 
tasks:
  default:
    cmds:
      - echo "{{.GREETING}}"
    silent: true

The task name is default.
You can define more tasks by adding them to the task section.

Here is a breakdown of the Taskfile:

Field	Description
`version`	The version of the Taskfile format to run
`vars`	Variables that can be used in the Taskfile
`tasks`	The tasks to run
`cmds`	The commands to run
`silent`	If true, The tasks metadata will not be printed, it will only print the output of the command.

Add a new task to the Taskfile

Taskfile.yml


version: '3'
 
vars:
  GREETING: Hello, World!
 
tasks:
  default:
    cmds:
      - echo "{{.GREETING}}"
    silent: true
  hello:
    cmds: # commands to run
      - echo 'Hello World from Task!' > output.txt

Call a task

More Info

You can use task --help to see all available options and flags.

When you run the task command, it will look for a Taskfile in the current directory or in the specified directory.


task <task-name>
 
# run the task in the current directory
task default
 
# run the task in the specified directory
task --dir ./directory-path default
 
# run the task with a custom Taskfile
task --taskfile CustomTaskfile.yml default

In this case, we will run the hello task that we just added to the Taskfile.


task hello

Verify the output by checking the contents of `output.txt`:


cat output.txt

You should see the following output:

output.txt


Hello World from Task!