Use Task Runners for Common Coding Tasks

4 hours ago

The author frequently switches between code repositories with different tech stacks and wants to run common tasks like installing dependencies, building, linting, formatting, and testing without remembering varying commands.
To achieve consistency, they create convenience tooling such as bash scripts, Makefiles, justfiles, or mise.toml files that allow using the same command (e.g., run build or make test) across projects.
A simple bash script can wrap common commands with functions for install, build, test, format, etc., offering flexibility but with sometimes awkward syntax.
Make is a classic, widely available tool; it uses a Makefile with targets and requires .PHONY declarations to avoid file conflicts, and some shells provide tab completion for its targets.
just is a newer, simpler task runner inspired by Make, with a straightforward justfile syntax, but it must be installed separately.
mise is a modern developer tool that can manage tools, environment variables, and run tasks via a mise.toml file, and tasks can be extracted into separate files if needed.
Implementing any of these approaches is a small quality-of-life improvement that is easy to set up and can save time across multiple repositories.

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