Included Taskfiles can have includes

[ameershira-uman]

Hi @andreynering

I have a use case for the "Included Taskfiles can't have includes. Please, move the include to the main Taskfile" message.

I have a project that includes a git submodule, that includes a git submodule, that includes a git submodule.

• These submodules are libraries that depend on other libraries.
• These libraries were not purpose-built for this project, and we don't always have control over what is included in the taskfile of these separate subprojects.
• The projects themselves are not aware of how deep they will be sitting in a future project.
• The included Taskfiles include general tasks such as deps-checks, build, run, clean, run-tests, ect.
• The highest-level project is not directly aware of the lowest level subproject.
• The highest-level project is not guaranteed to always be the highest-level project.

So to say "Included Taskfiles can't have includes" is not really something we can always control. And I would like to do the following:

1. From the highest-level project I would like to call the deps-check task, and this task would call the deps-check of the subproject, which should call the deps-check task of its subproject etc. This chain allows us to abstract the projects correctly as the highest level project should not need to change its taskfile when the lowest level project changes - it should not be that aware.

2. From the highest-level project I would like to call the build task. The build task would depend on the subproject build task which would depend on its subproject build task which depends on its subproject build task. In order for the main project to run, the lowest level library needs to be built, and every other going up the dependency tree.

The goal of writing once and using in as many use cases as possible is crippled by the "Included Taskfiles can't have includes" rule.

I'm hoping that I am completely incorrect and that there is a better way to do this.

If we are concerned about having too many tasks being accessible on the highest level project, then would it not make sense to explicitly select which tasks to include and expose from an included taskfile? This way only the relevant tasks are filtered up to the top-level project?

Looking forward to your feedback.

Kind Regards

[tylermmorton]

Hi @ameershira-uman, thank you for starting a discussion on this topic. I'm also going to mention #390 for reference/backlink since this discussion is happening in multiple places.

I agree with a lot of the points you've brought up here and have the exact same set of issues on my project! You've described the limitations of this issue much more elegantly than I could have. I've put up a PR for this functionality at #656.

[lukepighetti]

We have a situation where we'd like to generate an intermediary Taskfile.packages.yml based on the contents of a folder that contains a bunch of modularized packages which each have their own Taskfile. These packages are always changing, and this intermediary Taskfile would be consumed by the project root Taskfile. Very surprised to find out that this is not possible.

package_a/Taskfile.yml

version: "3"

tasks:
  clean: echo 'clean'

tasks/Taskfile.packages.yml (generated)

version: '3'

includes:
  package_a:
    taskfile: ../packages/package_a
    dir: ../packages/package_a
  package_b:
    taskfile: ../packages/package_b
    dir: ../packages/package_b
  package_c:
    taskfile: ../packages/package_c
    dir: ../packages/package_c
  package_d:
    taskfile: ../packages/package_d
    dir: ../packages/package_d
  package_e:
    taskfile: ../packages/package_e
    dir: ../packages/package_e
  package_f:
    taskfile: ../packages/package_f
    dir: ../packages/package_f

tasks:
  clean:
    deps:
      - 'package_a:clean'
      - 'package_e:clean'
      - 'package_f:clean'
      - 'package_d:clean'
      - 'package_c:clean'
      - 'package_b:clean'
  test:
    deps:
      - 'package_e:test'
      - 'package_d:test'
      - 'package_c:test'
      - 'package_b:test'
  analyze:
    deps:
      - 'package_b:analyze'

Taskfile.yml

version: "3"

includes:
  packages: ./tasks/Taskfile.packages.yml

tasks:
  clean:
    desc: Run flutter clean on app and all packages
    cmds:
      - task: packages:clean
      - flutter clean

[lukepighetti]

Looks like we have a PR that addresses this which has been sitting waiting for final review for about a month #656

[andreynering]

Just merged as #656