Linting of commands

[orenmazor]

So this is not fully fleshed out in my head yet.

The gist is as such: my team currently uses makefiles + shell scripts to do things. this is obviously messy and awful.

I've done a few PoCs to migrate those things into taskfile and it's a beautiful world.

but here's the rub: we use shellcheck in all of our CI/vim/local machines/etc to verify shell scripts for various code smells.

I'd love to figure out a way to do this in taskfile, but I haven't used this tool enough yet to figure out how to do it.

I can think of a few hacky ways to do it. for example: task --shell -t mytaskfile.yaml mytask and it dumps that task as a mini-shell script. I can then pipe that to shellcheck.

or even better, build shellcheck into task: task --lint -t mytaskfile.yaml mytask and it would run each command through shellcheck.

the goal isn't to verify anything or do any complex stuff. the goal is to catch weird little typos or bad commands or other basic tripwire features.

[andreynering]

Hi @orenmazor,

You seem to work for 1Password? I use that for both work and personal use and love the tool. 🙂

---

Interesting idea, indeed. I'd say it's a bit unconventional for Task to have official integrations with external tools, although integrations with watchman and Docker were discussed in the past. Go stuff usually try to be self-contained when possible.

For this reason, it'd make more sense to try to do that with mvdan/sh given we already use it for actually running stuff. The problem is, it only contains a formatter, and not a linter AFAIK.

To allow shellcheck use it'd make more sense to have a flag to output the bash so it can be manually redirected to shellcheck (or something else), as you suggested. This is probably relatively simple, and pull requests would be welcome!

[orenmazor]

hey Andrey, sure do. we're testing this tool out in our ops teams :)

and cool, I agree with you. a pure bash output would be the handiest as far as integrations go. I'll kick this idea around and maybe punt a PR at you folks :)

[perobertson]

Having taskfile output the contents of the bash script would work great. That way each tool can work on their own without coupling them together. In my example here, we could replace the echo "echo 'hello'" with the task command that would output the shell script.

shellcheck <(echo "echo 'hello'")

In /proc/self/fd/11 line 1:
echo 'hello'
^-- SC2148: Tips depend on target shell and yours is unknown. Add a shebang or a 'shell' directive.

[ghostsquad]

I actually really like the idea of shellcheck native integration. I think that would be very clean, and the fact that you can use shell scripts in many places throughout a task file would make it cumbersome to validate. I'm going to tag this, and come back to it for v4.

[andreynering]

@ghostsquad Let's proceed with the idea discussed above of having flag to output the command first. That's simple enough and allow integration with other tools as well, not being tied to shellcheck only. I also don't think we need to wait for v4 to have it.

I think that will be good enough as a first try, and we can always decide to have a better integration in the future if that shows necessary.

[ghostsquad]

Ya, no need to wait for v4, just keeping this on my list.

[the-kaustubh]

please assign the issue to me. Thanks!