Just Programmer's Manual

Formatting and dumping justfiles

Each justfile has a canonical formatting with respect to whitespace and newlines.

You can overwrite the current justfile with a canonically-formatted version using the currently-unstable --fmt flag:

$ cat justfile
# A lot of blank lines





some-recipe:
  echo "foo"
$ just --fmt --unstable
$ cat justfile
# A lot of blank lines

some-recipe:
    echo "foo"

Invoking just --fmt --check --unstable runs --fmt in check mode. Instead of overwriting the justfile, just will exit with an exit code of 0 if it is formatted correctly, and will exit with 1 and print a diff if it is not.

You can use the --dump command to output a formatted version of the justfile to stdout:

$ just --dump > formatted-justfile

The --dump command can be used with --dump-format json to print a JSON representation of a justfile.