Tasks

Define and run project tasks for building, testing, linting, deploying, and everyday development workflows.

You can define tasks in mise.toml files or as standalone shell scripts. They are useful for running linters, tests, builds, servers, and other commands that are specific to a project. Tasks launched with mise include the mise environment—the tools and env vars defined in mise.toml.

Here are my favorite features of 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
• the ability to write tasks as actual bash script files rather than inside yml/json/toml strings, which lack syntax highlighting and linting/checking support

There are 2 ways to define tasks: inside of mise.toml files or as standalone shell scripts. You can also use task templates to create reusable task definitions.

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 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 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, as with TOML tasks. See the file tasks reference for more information.

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. If the config path is something like ~/src/myproj/.config/mise.toml, this is ~/src/myproj.
• MISE_PROJECT_ROOT: The root of the project that defines the task. For monorepo subproject tasks this is the subproject's directory and is stable regardless of the directory the task is invoked from.
• MISE_MONOREPO_ROOT: The root of the monorepo (the directory containing the config with monorepo_root = true). Only set inside a monorepo.
• MISE_TASK_NAME: The name of the task being run.
• MISE_TASK_COLOR: The ANSI sequence that starts the task's prefix color and emphasis. This is set to an empty string when colors are disabled or the selected output mode does not display a task prefix. Add an ANSI reset after the text, for example printf '%smessage\033[0m\n' "$MISE_TASK_COLOR". The replacing output style also provides the value when it uses its text fallback. The variable describes the task label style and does not mean that every line is automatically prefixed.
• MISE_TASK_DIR: The directory containing the task script.
• MISE_TASK_FILE: The full path to the task script.