Just Command Runner

I have never been someone who takes the time to customise their shell environment, perhaps I am missing out on all the hype around fish shell and atuin. Generally speaking my preference is to invest the time upfront to automate, implement health checks and recovery scripts so my time on the shell once the system is setup is minimal.

Whilst I have been very pleased with how low maintenance my systems are I have found that when I do need to work on a system interactively that I am often searching through my history trying to recall some command I rarely use. This has been further complicated by my security enhancements made to bash history which excludes specific sensitive commands that require secrets as well as commands prepended with a space from being written to history.

Looking to improve upon this solution I considered using bash aliases to be able to easily recall commands but I don’t like this approach since aliases are not easily discoverable. Canvasing GitHub for potential solutions I came across Just Command Runner.

just is a command runner that is supported on Linux, MacOS, and Windows with no additional dependencies. just uses the concept of recipes which is a reference a command or set of commands. just can execute commands in any language supported by the underlying shell and therefore supports all niceties provided by your shell of choice including aliases, functions, command evaluation, conditional expressions and more.

The following example shows the contents of one of the just file I use to manage my Nextcloud server.

@_list-recipes:
  just --list --unsorted

nextcloud-update-application:
  sudo --user=apache /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/nextcloud/updater/updater.phar 

nextcloud-update-apps:
  sudo --user=apache /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/nextcloud/occ app:update --all

nextcloud-maintenance-mode state:
  sudo --user=apache /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/nextcloud/occ maintenance:mode --{{ state }}

nextcloud-check-onlyoffice-connectivity:
  sudo --user=apache /usr/bin/php /var/www/html/nextcloud/occ onlyoffice:documentserver --check

nextcloud-open-config:
  vi /var/www/html/nextcloud/config/config.php
  
restic-list-snapshots:
  restic --repository-file /etc/restic/repository.env --password-file /etc/restic/password snapshots

To then and excute a command you reference the command using the just prefix any option as required, like so;

just nextcloud-maintenance-mode state on

My requirements for just are very basic but even with the most basic of requirements just has removed friction, particularly since when I am working interactively it is usually in response to a problem so I am at risk of error due to stress. Being able to define and recall these commands with bash completion in a single location that is easily discoverable reduces the margin for error and encourages iterative improvement over time.

What I like about just is that it can as simple or complex I like. My use cases are more aligned to a Sys Admin rather than a Developer so I tend to rely on just to pass options to existing scripts or binaries rather than using all the features.

Before closing out I wanted to be fair and give credit to the Developer. I am not using just in the way the Developer aspires and I am therefore selling the features short. I just wanted to use this section to cover off the Developers use case and broader features in case it solves a problem that impacts you.

The selling pitch for just is, just is a handy way to save and run project-specific commands. In practice what this means is that each of your project directories would have its own justfile which would execute commands specific to that project, think anything from building an application, running unit tests, cleaning up prior to commiting code etc.

The just command will look for a just file in set paths. This preferential ordering enables the creation of just files on a per project basis providing modularity and preventing the need to consider external impacts when amending just files for the specific project.

On portability, just files can include optional meta-data on a per recipe basis which among other things enables the transparent filtering of recipes based on the operating system platform which just is being execute upon.

I highly recommend checking out just, I use it across my systems and have found it to be a great addition to my toolbox.