Context-aware single-letter project commands to speed up your command-line workflow.

•   🏗   b to build/compile any project.
•   🚀   r to run/start any project.
•   🧪   t to test any project.

• Supports over 20 build and project tools – Bun, Cabal, Cargo, CMake, .NET, Dune, Go, Gradle, Lake, Leiningen, Mage, Maven, Meson, Poetry, Stack, Tectonic, just, make, nix, npm, pnpm, and yarn. More details.
• Portable – Dependency-free portable POSIX shell script. Supports Linux, macOS, WSL, etc.
• Shell Integration – Works with aliases in any shell and for the Fish shell through a Fish plugin.
• Simple – Easy to extend with support for new tools.

If you're a developer and command line user, you're probably constantly using commands like make, cargo run, npm test, etc. The common approach of using shell aliases to provide shorthand forms for frequently used commands does not work well in these cases. For example, creating an alias like b for cargo build one day is completely useless the next day when working in a project that uses a different build tool.

projectdo solves that problem. It executes project actions (such as build, run, test, etc.) with the appropriate tool for the project in the current working directory. The appropriate tool is intelligently detected based on the context where projectdo is executed. For instance, projectdo test runs cargo test if a Cargo.toml is found and npm test if a package.json file is found.

By combining projectdo with shell aliases, project commands can be run in any project with minimal typing. As an example, with the alias alias b='projectdo build', you can build any project simply by typing b+enter.

projectdo can be installed through a number of package managers or by manually downloading the shell script.

projectdo can be installed with Homebrew on macOS and Linux.

brew install paldepind/tap/projectdo

The AUR package can be installed manually or using an AUR helper.

yay -S projectdo

projectdo is not related to Node.js or JavaScript, but npm works perfectly fine for distributing shell scripts and can be a handy installation method if you're already using npm:

npm i -g projectdo

Download the script and place it somewhere in your path. For instance if ~/bin is in your path:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/paldepind/projectdo/main/projectdo -o ~/bin/projectdo
chmod +x ~/bin/projectdo

Clone the project repository:

git clone https://github.com/paldepind/projectdo; cd projectdo

Install it with this command:

make install

# Or to uninstall
make uninstall

For the Fish shell use the Fish plugin. For Bash and Zsh setup shell aliases.

projectdo ships with a plugin for the Fish shell. The plugin includes auto-completion and functions for use with Fish's abbreviation feature.

The Fish plugin can be installed manually or with Fisher:

fisher install paldepind/projectdo

The plugin exposes four shell functions that should be configured with abbreviations as desired. For instance:

abbr -a b --function projectdo_build
abbr -a r --function projectdo_run
abbr -a t --function projectdo_test
abbr -a p --function projectdo_tool

With the above configuration, t will expand to cargo test, p will expand to cargo, etc. depending on the project.

Note that you need to have the script in your path in order for the Fish plugin to work!

projectdo can be configured with shell aliases in any shell. For instance:

alias t='projectdo test'
alias r='projectdo run'
alias b='projectdo build'
alias p='projectdo tool'

Note: When executed with the -d flag, projectdo performs a dry run and only prints information about what it would do without actually doing anything. It is a good idea to do a dry run when using projectdo in a project for the first time to verify that it does the right thing.

Usage: projectdo [options] [action] [tool-arguments]
Options:
  -h, --help             Display this help.
  -n, -d, --dry-run      Do not execute any commands with side-effects.
  -q, --quiet            Do not print commands as they are about to be executed.
  -v, --version          Display the version of the program.

Actions:
  build, run, test       Build, run, or test the current project.
  tool                   Invoke the guessed tool for the current project.

Tool arguments:
  Any arguments following [action] are passed along to the invoked tool.

Note: If a tool you're interested in is not supported, please open an issue or a pull request.