Alfons 4
Alfons 4 is a rewrite of the original Alfons, written to be much more modular and usable. For the old Alfons 3, see the
three
GitHub branch.
Alfons is a task runner to help you manage your project. It's inspired by the worst use cases of Make (this means using make
instead of shell scripts), it will read an Alfonsfile, extract the exported functions and run the tasks in order. I would tell you that there is no real reason to use this thing, but it's becoming surprisingly useful, so actually try it out.
Table of contents
Changelog
4.4
- 4.4 (04.02.2021) Added
exists
and Experimental Teal Support.
Some critical bugs in the loading of taskfiles and the invocation of tasks have been fixed.
4.3
4.2
- 4.2 (02.10.2020) Internal overhaul.
Alfons 4.2 changes the whole way that Alfons works on the inside. Please refer to Loading and API for the most notable work.
4.1
- 4.1.4 (12.09.2020) - Bugfix on
default
task. - 4.1.3 (11.09.2020) - Funny Homestuck Number update. Fix
inotify
dependency. - 4.1.2 (29.08.2020) - More bugfixes
- 4.1.1 (27.08.2020) - Bugfixes
- 4.1 (27.08.2020) - Added
uses
Usage
Run alfons
in a directory with an Alfons.lua
or Alfons.moon
file. Using MoonScript (obviously) requires installing MoonScript via LuaRocks.
To see the documentation, check out the docs/
folder of this repo.
To get started using Alfons, check out the Tutorial or the Recipes.
Defining tasks
Tasks are obtained by either returning a table {tasks={}}
where the empty table is a list of named functions, or by exporting globals. The preferred mode for Lua is exporting globals, and the preferred mode for MoonScript is returning a table, although both work in both languages.
Lua:
-- Exporting globals
function always(self) print(self.name) end
-- Returning table
return { tasks = {
always = function(self) print(self.name) end
}}
MoonScript
-- Exporting globals
export always ==> print @name
-- Returning table
tasks:
always: => @name
Calling tasks
From the command line, simply pass the name of the task you wish to run. Alternatively, use tasks.TASK
to call TASK
if it's loaded.
Lua:
function test (self)
print("I am " .. self.name .. " and " .. self.caller .. " called me.")
end
function call (self)
tasks.test{caller = self.name}
end
MoonScript:
tasks:
test: => print "I am #{@name} and #{@caller} called me."
call: => tasks.test caller: @name
Arguments
Arguments are passed in the self
table of every function, which contains a field called name
which is, well, uh, its own name. You can also use the args
table to see the whole tree of arguments. Feel free to play with and abuse this!
Migrating from Alfons 3
Some functions are either not implemented or not yet ported.
Missing functions
moonc
, git
, clone
and toflags
do not exist anymore. The first three may be implemented at a later time, and the last won't be implemented due to the changes in Alfons' argument system. For now, you will have to use their command-line counterparts, so moonc file
becomes sh "moonc #{file}"
and such.
Importable tasks
fetch
/fetchs
is now just fetch
, and ms-compile
has been removed and will probably not come back. Write a compile task manually. This should work as a dropin replacement:
Lua:
compile = function()
for file in wildcard "**.moon" do sh "moonc ".. file end
end
MoonScript:
compile: => sh "moonc #{file}" for file in wildcard "**.moon"
Installing
Since this is not upstream yet, you can't install through the LuaRocks server. However, you can install Alfons using itself.
Alfons 4 is now available on LuaRocks!
$ luarocks install alfons
Extra features
The preincluded task fetch
depends on lua-http to be used. The watch
function depends on linotify and will not work on platforms other than Linux.
$ luarocks install http # lua-http
$ luarocks install inotify # linotify
Projects using Alfons
Thanks for using the project <3.
License
Throwing it to the public domain. Check out the license.
Goodbye?
goodbye.