Global and User justfiles

Global and User `justfile`s

If you want some recipes to be available everywhere, you have a few options.

Global Justfile

just --global-justfile, or just -g for short, searches the following paths, in-order, for a justfile:

$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/just/justfile
$HOME/.config/just/justfile
$HOME/justfile
$HOME/.justfile

You can put recipes that are used across many projects in a global justfile to easily invoke them from any directory.

User justfile tips

You can also adopt some of the following workflows. These tips assume you’ve created a justfile at ~/.user.justfile, but you can put this justfile at any convenient path on your system.

Recipe Aliases

If you want to call the recipes in ~/.user.justfile by name, and don’t mind creating an alias for every recipe, add the following to your shell’s initialization script:

for recipe in `just --justfile ~/.user.justfile --summary`; do
  alias $recipe="just --justfile ~/.user.justfile --working-directory . $recipe"
done

Now, if you have a recipe called foo in ~/.user.justfile, you can just type foo at the command line to run it.

It took me way too long to realize that you could create recipe aliases like this. Notwithstanding my tardiness, I am very pleased to bring you this major advance in justfile technology.

Forwarding Alias

If you’d rather not create aliases for every recipe, you can create a single alias:

alias .j='just --justfile ~/.user.justfile --working-directory .'

Now, if you have a recipe called foo in ~/.user.justfile, you can just type .j foo at the command line to run it.

I’m pretty sure that nobody actually uses this feature, but it’s there.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Customization

You can customize the above aliases with additional options. For example, if you’d prefer to have the recipes in your justfile run in your home directory, instead of the current directory:

alias .j='just --justfile ~/.user.justfile --working-directory ~'