Task Automation
Similar to Make, Just simplifies the execution of common and repetitive tasks.
This means you can specify targets in your justfile to reduce regularly executed tasks with complex commands (such as building your documentation) from, for example,
uv run --group docs sphinx-build -b html docs/ docs/_build/html
just docs 
Task overview
Run just in your terminal, and it will list all the recipies available for execution:
Available recipes:
build # Build the project, useful for checking that packaging is correct
clean # Remove all build, test, coverage and Python artifacts
clean-build # Remove build artifacts
clean-docs # Remove documentation build artifacts
clean-pyc # Remove Python file artifacts
clean-test # Remove test and coverage artifacts
coverage # Run coverage, and build to HTML
docs # Compile the documentation
docs-serve # Serve the documentation with live reload
lint *ARGS # Run ruff check for linting without modifying files
pdb *ARGS # Run all the tests, but on failure, drop into the debugger
publish # Publish to PyPI (manual alternative to GitHub Actions)
qa # Run all the formatting, linting, and testing commands
tag # Tag the current version in git and put to github
test *ARGS # Run all the tests, but allow for arguments to be passed
test-gh-actions # Test github actions locally
version # Print the current version of the project
Some commands allow for arguments to be passed. For the exact commands, have a look at the justfile in the project directory.
Add your own tasks
You can add custom tasks to your justfile, simply by defining a target and the actions to execute:
# Short description of my new task
my-new-task:
echo "My new task..."
# Add your commands
For more details on Just, read the Just documentation.
Create shortcuts for complex commands
I usually structure my data-processing workflow such that I can run a single process via the command line1, for example
python scripts/process-raw-data.py -i data/raw/input_data.csv -o ./data/interim/ --clean-data --fill_nan
These commands I set as targets in the justfile, for example:
# Process raw data and write the newly generated data into ./data/interim/
process-raw-data:
python scripts/process-raw-data.py -i data/raw/input_data.csv -o ./data/interim/ --clean-data --fill_nan
I can now simply run just process-raw-data in the project's root directory.