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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 --fmt flag:

$ cat justfile
# A lot of blank lines





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

some-recipe:
    echo "foo"

When the justfile is read from standard input with --justfile - or extracted from a markdown file, --fmt prints the formatted justfile to stdout.

Note that formatting is not covered by any backwards compatibility guarantee and is subject to change from time to time.

Recipe bodies are indented with four spaces by default. This can be changed with the --indentation command-line option, the JUST_INDENTATION environment variable, or the indentation setting:

set indentation := "  "

Invoking just --fmt --check 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.