New if: control and interactivity support

Valentin Maerten

Maintainer

The v3.47.0 release is here, and it brings two exciting new features to Task. Let's take a closer look at them!

The New if: Control

This first feature is simply the second most upvoted issue of all time (!) with 58 👍s (!!) at the time of writing.

It introduces the if: control, which allow you to conditionally skip the execution of certain tasks and proceeding. if: can be set on a task-level or command-level, and can be either a Bash command or a Go template expression.

Let me show a couple of examples.

Task-level with Bash expression:

version: '3'

tasks:
  deploy:
    if: '[ "$CI" = "true" ]'
    cmds:
      - echo "Deploying..."
      - ./deploy.sh

Command-level with Go template expression:

version: '3'

tasks:
  conditional:
    vars:
      ENABLE_FEATURE: "true"
    cmds:
      - cmd: echo "Feature is enabled"
        if: '{{eq .ENABLE_FEATURE "true"}}'
      - cmd: echo "Feature is disabled"
        if: '{{ne .ENABLE_FEATURE "true"}}'

For more details, please check out the documentation. The examples from the test suite may be useful too.

INFO

We had similar functionality before, but nothing that perfectly fits this use case. There were sources: and status:, but those were meant to check if a task was up-to-date, and preconditions:, but this would halt the execution of the task instead of skipping it.

Prompt for Required Variables

For backward-compatibility reasons, this feature is disabled by default. To enable it, either pass --interactive flag or add interactive: true to your .taskrc.yml.

Once you do that, Task will basically starting prompting you in runtime for any required variables. In the example below, NAME will be prompted at runtime:

version: '3'

tasks:
  # Simple text input prompt
  greet:
    desc: Greet someone by name
    requires:
      vars:
        - NAME
    cmds:
      - echo "Hello, {{.NAME}}!"

If a given variable has an enum, Task will actually show a selection menu so you can choose the right option instead of typing:

version: '3'

tasks:
  # Enum selection (dropdown menu)
  deploy:
    desc: Deploy to an environment
    requires:
      vars:
        - name: ENVIRONMENT
          enum: [dev, staging, prod]
    cmds:
      - echo "Deploying to {{.ENVIRONMENT}}..."

Once again, check out the documentation for more details, and the prompt examples from the test suite.

Feedback

Let's us know if you have any feedback! You can find us on our Discord server.