Dynamic recipes

[infused-kim]

Hi,

First of all, thank you for creating such an amazing piece of software!

I just started using just and was amazed by how it is already supporting everything I want (and hated about using make as a task-runner).

However, I came across one use-case that doesn't seem to be possible yet.

I would like to be able to define dynamic tasks using a script or file list. For example, I am using just in my ansible IT automation repo. Currently, I have to maintain one recipe for each playbook that I want to be able to run through just like this:

# Run an ansible playbook
[group("playbooks")]
play playbook_path target:
    ansible-playbook {{ playbook_path }} --limit {{ target }}

# Run init_server playbook
[group("playbooks")]
init_server target:
    ansible-playbook playbooks/init_server.yml --limit {{ target }}

# Run setup_user_personal playbook
[group("playbooks")]
setup_user_personal target:
    ansible-playbook playbooks/setup_user_personal.yml --limit {{ target }}

It would be awesome if I could create a script that lists all files in ./playbooks and generates the recipes.

This would also be useful in nodejs projects that already have scripts inside the package.json. Just could parse the file and automatically add all the node scripts as targets so that everything can be run through just.

[casey]

Interesting request, and glad you like just!

I can definitely see the use case. I wonder how this could be supported in a generic way. Maybe an setting which is a command, where just will invoke that command and expect it to return JSON of the form {"recipes": {<recipe_name>: {"body": <recipe_body>}}} and add dynamic recipes named recipe_name with body recipe_body?

[infused-kim]

Thank you for the super-fast response.

Yes, something like that would be ideal. It could run a python script, for example, that returns the recipes.