I'm getting older. My memory and my wrists aren't as nimble as they once were.

When I do get a sliver of time to work on a personal project, it's nice to have a couple of project specific one-liners that I can run in my terminal to save me from the inevitable chore of re-reading the documentation of whatever build tool or process I want to use.

Just is a tool that supplements my aging brain wonderfully. It's essentially a command runner in the guise of a Makefile.

All I have to do is craft a small .justfile in the root directory of a project, whilst the commands are all fresh in my mind. When I finally return to my project, I smash just -l into my terminal and I'll be welcomed by a list of actions I can execute, based on the project I'm in.

Take this blog, for example. Do I remember the hugo new content… command each year I pressure myself into writing a new blog post? Hell no!

I have a .justfile for my blog, and after checking my usual actions with just (no -l needed for me, you'll see why), I'm reminded that I can run just post followed by a post title to create a new blog post and open it in a text editor.

Here's my blog's .justfile in all its glory:

# `just` override
_default:
    just -l

# Serve the site on localhost
serve:
    hugo serve -D

# Create a new blog post (titles-like-this)
post title:
    hugo new content posts/{{title}}.md
    mkdir -p ./content/posts/{{title}}/assets
    mv ./content/posts/{{title}}.md ./content/posts/{{title}}/index.md
    hx ./content/posts/{{title}}/index.md

# Start a tmux session
tmux:
    tmux new -Pd -s blog -n code
    tmux neww -Pd -t blog -F 2 -n serve
    tmux send-keys -t blog:2 "just serve" Enter
    firefox http://localhost:1313/ &
    tmux attach -d -t blog

Here, there are four recipes, or actions as I sometimes call them. The _default recipe means that I can use the just command without the -l to list my available actions. The serve recipe simply gets my website running locally.

The post recipe creates a new blog entry with a title that I provide at invocation (just post super-sexy-catchy-post-title), wrangles that post into the directory structure that I like and then opens that new post in my text editor of the day.

Finally, the tmux recipe spawns a new tmux session with two windows - one for activities and one for serving my website locally. It also cracks open a browser window, loading the locally hosted instance of my site. This is useful for when I might decide to work on my theme or site functionality.

Using this tool allows me to start being productive quickly, with less typing - saving my poor wrists from extraneous fatigue.

Here's an example of a .justfile that I might use for in a directory that contains a number of dockerfiles:

# Variables for defaults
defaultFile := 'bestOne'

# `just` override
_default:
    just -l

# Build a dockerfile
build file=defaultFile:
    docker build -f ./{{file}}.dockerfile -t {{file}}:taaaag .

# Build and run a dockerfile
run file=defaultFile: (build file)
    docker run -it --rm {{file}}:taaaag

# (Hidden) Build and Tag container image
_tag version file=defaultFile: (build file)
    docker tag {{file}}:taaaag container-registry.com/{{file}}:{{version}}

# Build, Tag and Push a container image
publish version file=defaultFile: (_tag version file)
    docker push container-registry.com/{{file}}:{{version}}

This one's a little more complex but it shows how you can chain recipes together. For example, the run recipe will first run the build recipe.

I won't go into much more detail here - hopefully you see how I find this utility useful. If you're interested in checking Just out, it's documentation is pretty thorough.