Tasks

Like make it manages tasks used to build and test projects.

You can define tasks in mise.toml files or as standalone shell scripts. These are useful for things like running linters, tests, builders, servers, and other tasks that are specific to a project. Of course, tasks launched with mise will include the mise environment—your tools and env vars defined in mise.toml.

Here's my favorite features about mise's task runner:

• building dependencies in parallel—by default with no configuration required
• last-modified checking to avoid rebuilding when there are no changes—requires minimal config
• mise watch to automatically rebuild on changes—no configuration required, but it helps
• ability to write tasks as actual bash script files and not inside yml/json/toml strings that lack syntax highlighting and linting/checking support

There are 2 ways to define tasks: inside of mise.toml files or as standalone shell scripts.

Tasks in mise.toml files

Tasks are defined in the [tasks] section of the mise.toml file.

mise.toml

[tasks.build]
description = "Build the CLI"
run = "cargo build"

You can then run the task with mise run build (or mise build if it doesn't conflict with an existing command).

• See the TOML tasks for more information.
• See Running Tasks to learn how to run tasks.

File Tasks

You can also define tasks as standalone shell scripts. All you have to do is to create an executable file in a specific directory like mise-tasks.

mise-tasks/build

#!/usr/bin/env bash
#MISE description="Build the CLI"
cargo build

You can then run the task with mise run build like for TOML tasks. See the file tasks reference for more information.

Task Configuration

The [task_config] section of mise.toml allows you to customize how mise executes and organizes task.

Changing the default directory tasks are run from

[task_config]
# change the default directory tasks are run from
dir = "{{cwd}}"

Including toml tasks files or other directories of file tasks

[task_config]
# add toml files containing toml tasks, or file tasks to include when looking for tasks
includes = [
    "tasks.toml", # a task toml file
    "mytasks"     # a directory containing file tasks (in addition to the default file tasks directories)
]

If using included task toml files, note that they have a different format than the mise.toml file. They are just a list of tasks. The file should be the same format as the [tasks] section of mise.toml but without the [task] prefix:

tasks.toml

task1 = "echo task1"
task2 = "echo task2"
task3 = "echo task3"

[task4]
run = "echo task4"

If you want auto-completion/validation in included toml tasks files, you can use the following JSON schema: https://mise.jdx.dev/schema/mise-task.json

Vars

Vars are variables that can be shared between tasks like environment variables but they are not passed as environment variables to the scripts. They are defined in the vars section of the mise.toml file.

[vars]
e2e_args = '--headless'

[tasks.test]
run = './scripts/test-e2e.sh {{vars.e2e_args}}'

Like most configuration in mise, vars can be defined across several files. So for example, you could put some vars in your global mise config ~/.config/mise/config.toml, use them in a task at ~/src/work/myproject/mise.toml. You can also override those vars in "later" config files such as ~/src/work/myproject/mise.local.toml and they will be used inside tasks of any config file.

As of this writing vars are only supported in TOML tasks. I want to add support for file tasks, but I don't want to turn all file tasks into tera templates just for this feature.

Environment variables passed to tasks

The following environment variables are passed to the task:

• MISE_ORIGINAL_CWD: The original working directory from where the task was run.
• MISE_CONFIG_ROOT: The directory containing the mise.toml file where the task was defined.
• MISE_PROJECT_ROOT or root: The root of the project.
• MISE_TASK_NAME: The name of the task being run.
• MISE_TASK_DIR: The directory containing the task script.
• MISE_TASK_FILE: The full path to the task script.