Show HN: Run – Easily manage and invoke small scripts and wrappers (opens in new tab)

Hi @brian_cloutier,

A couple of things that come to mind (although I should probably flesh out a section on the README for this):

* Auto-Generated Help From comments - There are patterns for adding a 'help' target in make that generates light documentation for the targets - I maintain a gist for such a pattern in a different github account.

* Per-Command Shell - bash, python, ruby, you decide !

* Per-Command Options/flags - With documentation!

* Positional Arguments - By default, make treats all non-variable arguments as targets, so you can't say "make action argument"

* Commands Executed in One Sub-Shell - By default make executes each line of a recipe in a separate sub-shell, requiring you to use '\' to link multiple lines into a single recipe.

No doubt make is useful for this, hence why all my dev friends use it, but make was not designed to manage non-build-related targets, and has some cracks in it with regards to that use case.

I think (hope) run can prove useful as a dedicated tool for this use case.

Thanks for the question - I hope that helps - Please let me know if you have any other comments or questions.

To my understanding, a Makefile is designed for single commands and not for scripts.

Hi @mmgutz,

Thanks for linking these other projects - I'm going to add a section in my README linking to other projects that people might find useful for their various use cases.

Go-task feels like a build tool and not really a general task runner.

Looks like Just brings a lot of similar features and I will definitely be looking into it deeper. However it still touts itself a build-tool at heart.

Run is NOT trying to be a build tool - It wants to be a script/wrapper manager and so the feature set is trying to optimize for that.

Thanks for the question - I hope that helps - Please let me know if you have any other questions or comments.

BTW: Can you link to your "own personal task runner" ? I'd love to see it and others might find it useful, too.

I personally find Run to be the easiest of the three to understand (it's self-documenting like a Dockerfile) and get started with, and I have exp with none of them.

I must admit robo is clever for using YAML where I built an entire parser to do somewhat the same thing :)

Greetings!

Yeah I haven't done much with Package managers (PKGBUILD, brew, etc) and thinking this project might be my excuse to start learning them.

Thanks for your kind words and offer for a PR - I'll keep an eye out for it !

Greetings!

I would say that expect is quite a different beast entirely. I think of expect more as an interactive scripting language. Something you might use in place of bash to write a small script that requires user interaction.

Run is more of the tool you might use to organize your expect / bash / etc. scripts and easily invoke them.

Pretty much every dev I know has used makefiles as a means to organize small, non-build-related, scripts and shell wrappers. Run hopes to be a better tool for doing that.

Thanks for the question - I hope that helped - Please let me know if you have any other questions or comments.

Expect is designed for an entirely different use case, it can "talk" to other interactive programs following a script. Run is intended to act as a replacement for using Makefiles as scripts (and is super awesome at that too). Basically, you'd find yourself using Expect inside a Runfile.

I was thinking the same thing, as I just had to create a bunch of ci scripts to preload a Firestore db and cloud functions for a pipeline using a gcloud emulator.

Thanks @a_band - Please don't hesitate to submit a bug report (or feature request!) if you get a chance to play around with it.