Testing Justfile Recipe Arguments

Time to fiddle with my site setup some more.

My site posts are organized by file slug: simplified file paths based on a title. Hugo itself directly supports creating new content by path.

hugo new content/post/2022/testing-justfile-recipe-arguments/index.adoc.txt

It takes thinking to map from a title to a slug. Sometimes I’m not in the mood for that kind of thinking. And I’m not always great about consistency in my slug choices.

So I use a Ruby script to streamline adding new posts. I won’t talk about that today. Maybe another day. All it does is use TTY::Toolkit to save me a couple seconds of thought compared to hugo new, then fires up $EDITOR for me so I don’t have to think about that either. Sometimes two seconds is the difference between writing an impulse post and writing a tweet.

Right now the script needs a --title string it can use for frontmatter and file slug.

bundle exec ruby _scripts/add-post --title 'Testing Justfile Recipe Arguments'

I don’t have to figure out the slug, but it’s still rather tedious. I use just to simplify those tedious site tasks. Putting the repeated bits of this invocation in a recipe — that’s what just calls tasks — would cut down on the tedium. What about the title? Started thinking about TTY::Toolkit interactive prompts. Maybe some other time, because just lets you specify arguments for a recipe.

add TITLE:
  bundle exec ruby _scripts/add-post --title '{{ TITLE }}'

Now I can just add a post.

just add 'Testing Justfile Recipe Arguments'

And here we are!

I use a couple other Ruby scripts. Might as well refactor that bundle exec ruby.

ruby := 'bundle exec ruby'

add TITLE:
  {{ ruby }} _scripts/add-post --title '{{ TITLE }}'

All right. This is better than what I had before. Sure I’ve got multiple helpful layers to track now. That’ll bite me if I get carried away. On the other hand, I actually wrote something for the site today.

Sometimes two seconds makes the difference.