Q: Does a Taskfile permit inline subtasks?

[fj]

Is something like the following possible:

tasks:
  sync:
    tasks:
      up: "rsync a b"
      down: "rsync b a"

with the aim of being able to do, e.g., task sync:up or task sync:down? In other words, are inline sub-tasks permitted? I see references to "sub-tasks" in the documentation but no documentation about how to create one directly -- it seems like you generally have to have separate files.

[ghostsquad]

In short, yes. Check out the document for more information.

tasks:
  up:
     cmds:
     - echo "up"
  down:
     cmds:
     - echo "down"
  sync:
     cmds:
     - task: up
     - task: down

[fj]

I don't think this is the same thing. This would create three tasks:

• a task called up
• a task called down
• a task called sync which calls up and down.

What I want is actually:

• a task called sync:up
• a task called sync:down

Including tasks from another file does this automatically; I was wondering if there's a way to do this inline.

[andreynering]

I'm not sure what you mean by "sub-tasks", but you can declare tasks with names like docker:start / docker:stop / etc (including an external Taskfile also does this automatically).

Also, it's possible to forward extra arguments to a command by doing this: https://taskfile.dev/#/usage?id=forwarding-cli-arguments-to-commands

[fj]

I'm not sure what you mean by "sub-tasks"

This is by analogy to subcommands (e.g. git commit) or other task managers which have similar features. For example, Ruby's rake has a similar idea:

namespace "main" do
  task :build do
    # Build the main program
  end

  # other main-specific tasks
end

namespace "samples" do
  task :build do
    # Build the sample programs
  end

  # other sample-specific tasks
end

namespace "docs" do
  task :build do
    # Build the sample programs
  end

  # ... other doc-specific tasks
end

This produces three tasks, main:build, samples:build, and docs:build. You could then have, say, task build-all: "main:build", "samples:build", "docs:build". Does that make sense?

[fj]

I think @andreynering's suggestion about just naming the tasks that way and hardcoding it is probably the most sensible approach for now. Thank you!

[slava-nikulin]

Including external task files is fine because the vscode extension displays the task list as a tree, but it's not very convenient because of the need to split tasks into folders. Especially if tasks are small