til/taskfile/run-a-task-if-it-meets-criteria.md

Run A Task If It Meets Criteria

The Taskfile status directive can be used to tell a task when it needs to run. If it doesn't need to run, it can be skipped over. The idea being that we're making a status check to see if we're up-to-date or need to run the task.

For instance, here is a status check that determines if there are changes to commit and push. If there are changes to NOTES.md, then we are out-of-date and need to run the cmds that make up the task.

  notes:push:
    desc: Commit and push changes to notes submodule
    dir: '{{.NOTES_DIR}}'
    cmds:
      - git add NOTES.md
      - git commit -m "Update notes - $(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')"
      - git push
    status:
      - git diff --exit-code NOTES.md
    silent: false

This is useful because I don't want the git add, git commit, and git push commands to run when there is nothing to do.

Note: this is different from the preconditions directive. Instead of short-circuiting a sequence of tasks, this will either run or skip the task and move on to the next one.