This issue has been marked as an experiment proposal! 🧪 It will now enter a period of consultation during which we encourage the community to provide feedback on the proposed design. Please see the experiment workflow documentation for more information on how we release experiments.

This experiment has been marked as a draft! ✨ This means that an initial implementation has been added to the latest release of Task! You can find information about this experiment and how to enable it in our experiments documentation. Please see the experiment workflow documentation for more information on how we release experiments.

If one wants to use remote tasks in CI how does one bypass the prompt when running a task for the first time. Is there a flag or environment variable that can be set to “force yes” to the prompt on whether or not to include the remote task file?

BTW thanks for a great experiment!

The documentation mentions the -y flag for tasks that require prompts, but the experimental documentation doesn't mention if that also applies to remote taskfile includes.

@wburningham Thanks for pointing this out. The --yes flag has not currently been set up to automatically accept the remote task prompts. This is definitely something we can consider in the next iteration. I think this is an acceptable change, but if anyone has any security concerns about being able to skip the remote taskfile warning prompts, please add a comment.

For Running root remote Taskfiles, consider specifying the remote taskfile via the --taskfile arg?
task hello --taskfile https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-task/task/main/Taskfile.yml

Any idea why the following doesn't work?

# taskfile.yml
version: '3'

include:
  my-remote-namespace: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-task/task/main/Taskfile.yml

tasks:
  test:
    cmds:
      - echo test succesful

$ task --version
Task version: 3.30.1
$ task test
task: [test] echo test succesful
test succesful
$ export TASK_X_REMOTE_TASKFILES=1
$ task my-remote-namespace:packages
task: No tasks with description available. Try --list-all to list all tasks
task: Task "my-remote-namespace:packages" does not exist

@oliver-helix Good idea about the root remote taskfiles. As for why your example doesn't work. I think its just a simple typo:

  # taskfile.yml
  version: '3'

- include:
  includes:
    my-remote-namespace: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/go-task/task/main/Taskfile.yml

  tasks:
    test:
      cmds:
        - echo test succesful

Edit: We should probably give a better error message for this...

Doh! My bad. Thanks for the help! Consider updating the experiment docs to fix this typo.

Ah whoops. Well spotted. I've updated the docs 👍

Hi, just wanted to say this experiment is exciting!

Do you have any plans to add support for remote endpoints that require authentication? My use case is that I have a remote Taskfile stored in GitLab. I would think an easy-ish way would be to honor my .netrc file like git and other tools do.

edit: I caught up on #1152 and I see there has already been talk about authentication. looking forward to whatever comes! Thanks.

The --yes flag has not currently been set up to automatically accept the remote task prompts. This is definitely something we can consider in the next iteration. I think this is an acceptable change, but if anyone has any security concerns about being able to skip the remote taskfile warning prompts, please add a comment.

@pd93 my company is ready to try out taskfiles because the remote taskfile experiment moved to draft. Being able to run on CI with a --yes flag is our next implementation step.

When you say "the next iteration" are you wanting (or willing to accept) a PR?

The Experiments Documentation didn't specify any general timelines for accepting feedback/comments. Are you planning on waiting a minimum amount of time before releasing changes to this experiment?

@wburningham really nice to hear that this feature is making the difference for you. Are there any other blockers or features you'd need before being able to use this fully? (besides the obvious Git/SSH integration).

When you say "the next iteration" are you wanting (or willing to accept) a PR?

Absolutely! Contributions are always welcome, though we encourage people to discuss them first to make sure multiple people aren't doing the same thing and/or wasting their time. In this particular case, I actually already have a branch which will add this functionality and I intend to post a PR soon. As a potential future user of that functionality, your feedback on this would be very welcome.

If there are other extensions/improvements you'd like to help contribute to, I'm always happy to have some help.

The Experiments Documentation didn't specify any general timelines for accepting feedback/comments. Are you planning on waiting a minimum amount of time before releasing changes to this experiment?

There is no minimum/fixed time period for changes. @andreynering and I both work on this in our spare time, so planning is hard and changes tend to happen in chunks when we find some bandwidth. A new draft of the experiment will be released alongside the next version of Task which tends to happen around once a month, but this is also subject to our availability and having a set of meaningful changes to release.

I'm hoping to address the remaining TODOs in this issue (not the future extensions) in the next week or so and hopefully we'll get some good feedback from that which will allow us to move forward.

Edit - See PR:

• feat: unify prompts #1344

I've also just created #1345 which changes the default behaviour of Remote Taskfiles to prefer remote files over cached ones as discussed in previous PRs.

I've added a couple of thoughts to the end of the PR description. I would really appreciate feedback on this from @andreynering @ryancurrah @caphrim007 and anyone else with an opinion on the matter 🙏

Any roadmap (ETA) for when remote taskfiles with Git ssh for private repository acecss will be added? Thanks so much for your hard work on this awesome project!

Greetings,

First and foremost, I would like to extend my heartfelt congratulations and gratitude for the exemplary work you have undertaken.

I am curious to know whether you have plans to support 'remote' Taskfiles that incorporate other Taskfiles. For instance, in this link: GitLab - Devcontainer Taskfiles, if a directory is segmented into multiple Taskfiles, will remotely including the principal Taskfile also entail the inclusion of the associated Taskfiles?

I look forward to your insightful response and thank you in advance for your consideration.

Is it possible to add completion capabilities on remote tasks?

Hi!
Thanks for your work, it's a really really appreciated feature!
We plan to use it, to mutualize all our project's Takefile
Amazing work 🔥

I wonder if adding something like a shasum check would be a good idea here

I love the experiment, the only thing I'm missing is an allow-list style configuration of what urls the experiment is allowed to fetch from at this moment. This would allow us to adopt it in CI and just allowlist the github public urls for the trusted org/repo/branch.

TASKLIST_X_REMOTE_TASKFILES_ALLOW=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/<Owner>/<Repo>/main/[,csv?]

Thanks all for the kind words :) Catching up on some comments:

Firstly, I don't have any ETAs for this experiment and I don't plan to give any. The last month or so has been pretty quiet in terms of progress and this is simply a reflection of other life priorities. The time I can give to the project varies a lot and some weeks you will see lots of progress and other weeks you will see none. For this reason, it would be unfair to make any promises that I can't keep. Rest assured that this is always on my mind and I fully intend to see it through. I won't be responding to any further comments on timelines/ETAs.

With that said, I'm very grateful for all the excitement and support and I really appreciate all the feedback and ideas. Please keep it coming ❤️

I am curious to know whether you have plans to support 'remote' Taskfiles that incorporate other Taskfiles. For instance, in this link: GitLab - Devcontainer Taskfiles, if a directory is segmented into multiple Taskfiles, will remotely including the principal Taskfile also entail the inclusion of the associated Taskfiles?

@ThomasSanson This is something I definitely want to support at some point and is on my TODO list. However, I haven't put much thought into how the implementation will work yet. I don't think we can ship the experiment without this as it would result in some very unexpected behaviour. Stay tuned.

Is it possible to add completion capabilities on remote tasks?

@lorenzofaresin It's definitely possible, but this is probably low priority and something that can be added once the experiment is stable. This is also heavily linked to #293 and #1157. Completions need some love and attention in general, not just for remote Taskfiles.

I wonder if adding something like a shasum check would be a good idea here

@yordis Can you please open a ticket for this so that we can discuss it in its own thread? It would be useful if you can include your use case for this. I can see a few, but it's nice to hear things from other people's perspectives.

an allow-list style configuration of what urls the experiment is allowed to fetch from at this moment

@titpetric Same as above. Could you please open an issue for this and explain your use case in as much detail as possible. I will take a look there.

It would also be very useful to have the ability to use remote files using the -t option not worry about having the file available locally and having a centralized task repository. For example, typing the command

task -t https://www.example.com/mytasks.yaml task1

Any roadmap (ETA) for when remote taskfiles with Git ssh for private repository acecss will be added? Thanks so much for your hard work on this awesome project!

Ugly workaround:

includes:
  private: https://git:[email protected]/user/repo/main/Taskfile.yml

Follow the discussion around this here: #1420 (reply in thread)

There is still no plan for the git ssh repository access?
It's a feature that prevent us to use this nice experiment... 😢

I understand that implement SSH can be time consuming and will be done in the long run but is there any plan to support env variable in Taskfile's URL ?
(Like proposed here : #1420 (reply in thread))

I prevent us (and maybe others) to use it because we have a private org

Any news on the possibility to use variable (tipycally for token) in github URL ?

What if we adopted a system similar to homebrew tap's where an org would have a taskfiles repository? I feel like we could simplify the import scheme.

Any roadmap (ETA) for when remote taskfiles with Git ssh for private repository acecss will be added? Thanks so much for your hard work on this awesome project!

Ugly workaround:

includes:
  private: https://git:[email protected]/user/repo/main/Taskfile.yml

Follow the discussion around this here: #1420 (reply in thread)

It seems local -> remote -> remote:local includes does not work correctly
I created another issue to track it down :

• Include a Taskfile in a remote Taskfile does not work #1531

@vmaerten #1347 is still WIP, but will include a fix for resolving includes in remote files correctly.

go-getter integration would be make go-task so much more useful for sharing tooling across our org. I think following the terraform cli's support for module sources would provide a validated approach to caching, auth, and featureset.

go-getter supports a double slash syntax to specify a subpath of folders/archives/repos. Supporting this would be amazing to give scripts access to supporting files. Developers just need to set up native credentials for the source, and then could pull in all the team's tooling using a remote include and vars. And any repo-specific tooling would remain in there

For caching, terraform always uses the local module path and exits with an error if it's missing. You run terraform init to download remote sources once, and whenever versions change. These sources are stored under the ignored tool folder, .task in this case. This makes it straightforward to debug since you can view the code locally.

To match the current behavior, go-task would download source by default, unless you used --download and --offline to try only the local version.

I've started working on adding support of Git in remote taskfile.

If you want to try it out, you need to clone my repo https://github.com/vmaerten/task, switch to remote-git branch, and run go run ./cmd/task -d <your_dir>

We will support SSH url, SCP url and HTTPS url.
You can find the docs here : https://github.com/vmaerten/task/blob/4f85e85167b375100e3da3803973ff203045935e/website/docs/experiments/remote_taskfiles.mdx?plain=1#L65

I'll add more examples in the next couple of days.

That is awesome @vmaerten thank for the work...

Why did you choose to set the filename and the git reference in the same querystring in the url? Why not just having a different querystring for the filename? https://github.com/foo/bar.git?ref=main&filename=directory/Taskfile.yml

Or if you don't want the extra query string, a more readable form I think could be to add the path to the file just after the .git https://github.com/foo/bar.git/directory/Taskfile.yml?ref=main maybe with a double slash // like terraform and others does.. https://github.com/foo/bar.git//directory/Taskfile.yml?ref=main

Sorry if this is not the place or time to give feedback. Maybe discord?

Hello @blackjid
Thanks a lot for your feedback. I've forgot to put the PR's URL here. I'll copy / past your comment there and we can discuss on it the PR

Hi,
First of all thanks for this project and work. I really appreciate this project. After replacing most of my make files I also plan to move CI/CD to Taskfile. In my case it is GitLab CI.

I wonder if it is possible to have something like a provider pattern for including remote files? With knowing the provider it would be possible to parse required credentials from CI environment variables during the include. This would make it easier for the user to handle the secrets.

Example:

includes:
  example: 
    provider: gitlab
    url: gitlab.my-org.com # for self-hosted variants, should default to SaaS
    project: my-group/project
    file: Taskfile.yaml
    ref: main

It's just an idea from the user's perspective. I have not yet been able to take a look at the code to say how well this can be implemented.

I've just taken my PR for cache TTL implementation out of draft, and it's ready for review now.

This looks indeed promising. Since we have most of our tasks quite generic (not coupled to one repo) it would be interesting to define a remote namespace as default so that task remote-namespace:my-task would convert to task my-task directly.

A PR is in progess to add a Flatten include (#1704) It'll be possible to combine remote with flatten.

Hi all - firstly thanks for the significant progress here, I'm eager to make use of this feature when it reaches maturity!

I've been building a few task utilities across multiple projects and am now beginning the work in normalizing usage now that some consistent patterns have emerged. The remote taskfile feature is exactly what I need to get this done.

I can be certain that a developer will have the github cli installed and intend to use that to source the users authentication token, the intent being it can then be used in the url of the remote file. However, it would seem that the environment parameters configured in the task file are not resolved before the remote includes.

For example, the following works:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://taskfile.dev/schema.json
version: '3'
output: prefixed

env:
  GH_TOKEN:
    sh: gh auth token

tasks:
  init-deps:
    desc: Initialize and update the project dependencies
    cmds:
      - echo {{.GH_TOKEN}}

The console displays the token returned from the github cli.

However the following does not work:

# yaml-language-server: $schema=https://taskfile.dev/schema.json
version: '3'
output: prefixed

env:
  GH_TOKEN:
    sh: |
      gh auth token

includes:
   remote-source: https://{{.GH_TOKEN}}@raw.githubusercontent.com/ORG/REPO/BRANCH/taskfile.yml

tasks:
  init-deps:
    desc: Initialize and update the project dependencies
    cmds:
      - task: remote-source:init-deps

The output of which is task: No Taskfile found at "https://@raw.githubusercontent.com/ORG/REPO/BRANCH/taskfile.yml"

I can see that the work from @vmaerten may well render this path obsolete (and I would be happy not to follow it) but I'm unsure if this is an issue in task itself, or the implementation of remote includes

Additionally, a note on this warning message

The task you are attempting to run depends on the remote Taskfile at "https://[email protected]/stadionHQ/tasks/main/terraform.taskfile.yml".
--- Make sure you trust the source of this Taskfile before continuing ---
Continue? [y/N]

The REDACTED string is not actually redacted in the console output. It would be good if any urls that may be presented in the outputs could be checked for authentication details prior to the domain and strip them out.

Hello, we have been experimenting with go-task at my workplace (Wattpad) and are looking into incorporating it into our CI/CD workflows. Thanks for creating such a useful tool! The features are really well thought out. I have a proposal:

We are looking for the ability to pull supporting files along with our remote Taskfile. We could build a separate tool for this, but it seems so close to what “remote taskfiles” provides that it could be a part of the same feature. In essence, we treat the remote Taskfile as a “remote bundle” that includes the whole directory along with the Taskfile. This allows us to include shared scripts and configuration files, alongside the Taskfile that exposes them.

I did a prototype where I reference a folder on github, and Task will:

• Download the whole folder into .task/cache/...
• Look for a default Taskfile name following the same rules as the root file (eg. Taskfile.yaml, Taskfile.dist.yaml, etc)
• Parse this file as the included file
• Resolve the taskfile path variables in the same way as local includes, such that one can reference the root taskfile path or the included taskfile path easily (ie: using .ROOT_TASKFILE, .ROOT_DIR, .TASKFILE, .TASKFILE_DIR)

This gives us the ability in the included file to reference other bundled files using paths based on .TASKFILE_DIR. In a way, this makes remote taskfile includes behave like local includes when it comes to the .TASKFILE_DIR variable.

The feature can remain optional and compatible with the single-remote-taskfile case by supporting both “folder” and “file” references. For example (using pseudo-URLs, not an actual format):

• when we reference github.com/org/repo/some/path/Taskfile.yaml, it will download only the single file (what we have today)
• when we reference github.com/org/repo/some/path, it will download the whole folder and look for a “standard” Taskfile name in there. (If we wanted a non-standard Taskfile name, that could be an optional parameter.)

How do you feel about incorporating this feature?

My proposal is that I put in the time to help design it, implement it, and submit necessary PRs (with others’ input of course).

Related to this, the go-getter library (mentioned above) would lend to this very well, as it is designed to download files and directories (or archives), and it handles other requests from this thread (authentication, other providers beyond HTTP). I would explore this option and satisfy both goals at the same time. If you would like to see any prototype PRs first to get a sense for how it would look and feel, I could do this as well.

Would you be open to this?

/cc @vmaerten - this would supersede #1652, but doesn't have to block it being merged if the syntax is compatible. Thanks for doing this work!

I've started a draft implementation of the above in #1774. I would love to discuss the design with someone, and we get some consensus I can continue implementing.