jake (crasis for “just make”) is a Make-like task executor for Unix-based operating systems. It is based on TOML task definitions (stored in a file called jakefile.toml) and can execute commands by resolving their dependencies and forwarding additional options from the command line.

Features

• Boilerplate initialization: with the --init option, you can create a boilerplate jakefile.toml
• Simple TOML syntax for task definition: no .PHONY declarations, no spacing rules
• Dependency resolution with circular dependency detection
• Extra arguments can be passed as options directly from the command line
• Default task execution when no task name is specified
• Composite commands support (e.g. cat README.md | grep Features or cd src/ && pwd)
• Subdirectory awareness: tasks can be invoked from any subdirectory of the directory containing jakefile.toml
• Listing tasks: tasks can be listed with the --list flag
• Loading .env files: .env files can be loaded for task execution with the --env flag
• Executing package.json scripts: in a JS/TS environment, scripts contained in a package.json file can be executed by passing the --js flag
• Inline scripts: write scripts in Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby, PHP, Lua, and Perl directly in jakefile.toml using the script key
• Custom working directory: with --cwd, you can point jake to any directory to use as the working directory for command execution, enabling workspace-wide task running
• Dry-run: --dry-run prints the commands that would be run without executing them
• Suppress command echo: --no-print-command hides the command before execution output

Comparison

The table below compares jake against just and make across key features:

⚠️ make supports passing variables from the command line but not named options in the same ergonomic way.