Task: Add support for delegating CLI arguments with "--" and a special CLI_ARGS variable

[huy-nguyen]

Does go-task currently offer the option of "passthrough" arguments? For example, if I have currently have a task to run the AWS CLI out of a Docker container:

tasks:
  aws:
    cmds:
      - docker-compose run --rm aws     

Is it possible to have the ability for a command like task aws -- ls s3://my-bucket to be translated to docker-compose run --rm aws ls s3://my-bucket, meaning task will pass through anything after -- to the underlying shell command?

This is a more convenient way to pass extra variables compared to the current approach: task write-file FILE=file.txt "CONTENT=Hello, World!". Currently, using this approach allows me to write task aws CMD="ls s3://my-bucket" but the extra variable definition and quotes creates a lot of friction that I think can be alleviated with my proposal.

If this is not possible, it would be a really nice capability to have in the future.

[andreynering]

Hi @huy-nguyen, thanks for opening this issue!

This is something that already came up recently by @mbertschler at #316.

Since more people think this would be important, I'll keep this issue open so this could be considered in the future.

I think that what would work is a mixture of these both proposals. We'd both require -- in the CLI to separate these args from other tasks and flags, and also require a special var to be concatenated in the right task[s]:

task yarn -- test-ci

version: '3'

tasks:
  yarn:
    dir: js
    cmds:
      - yarn {{.CLI_ARGS}}

[huy-nguyen]

@andreynering Your proposal sounds great. The one inconvenience with my current workaround of declaring variables on the command line (task write-file FILE=file.txt "CONTENT=Hello, World!") is that the shell doesn't offer tab completions within quoted strings. Because of that, allowing pass through arguments after -- is the superior solution.

[eankeen]

I am also in strong support of this feature. In my case, I would be appending {{.CLI_ARGS}} to most of my commands because I tag on extra arguments ad-hoc pretty frequently. Maybe there could be a way to make enable it as default with some option to reduce duplication?

like so:

version: '3'

passthroughArgs: true

tasks:
   yarn:
...

[stephencheng]

@huy-nguyen you may want to try it out of: https://github.com/upcmd/up, you can pass through args/vars to a callable task using call func

It is flexible enough, docs here: https://upcmd.netlify.app/call-func/c0020/

[huy-nguyen]

@stephencheng upcmd looks very nice and solves a lot of my use cases. How long have you worked on it?

[stephencheng]

@stephencheng upcmd looks very nice and solves a lot of my use cases. How long have you worked on it?

@huy-nguyen half year on code base itself, but this is not only about the code, it's about the devpos industry experience I accumulated many years and try to resolve those pain points, all counted, probably a few years :)

[JulienBreux]

🆙 Do you have any news about this killer feature?

[JulienBreux]

My point of view:

We have this: task firstTask secondTask

We want this: task firstTaks [ARGS] or task firstTaks secondTask [ARGS].

The question is: how to detect args vs task?

[JulienBreux]

@andreynering do you think if we havepassthroughArgs: true we can cancel the last error and pass arguments to each tasks?

For example:

1. task taskExists0 taskExists1 taskNotExists0 with passthroughArgs: true = exec taskExists0 with args taskNotExists0 and exec taskExists1 with args taskNotExists0 but no error
2. task taskExists0 taskExists1 taskNotExists0 without passthroughArgs: true = error taskNotExists0 doesn't exists?

[andreynering]

Hi @JulienBreux,

I proposed a solution in this comment that I think it'll work well.