Elk

Elk 🦌 is a minimalist, YAML based task runner that aims to help developers to focus on building cool stuff, instead of remembering to perform tedious tasks.

Since it's written in Go, most of the commands runs across multiple operating systems (Linux, macOS, Windows) and use the same syntax between them thanks to this library.

Why should i use this? You can watch some Use Cases

Table of contents

• Getting Started
  • Installation
• Syntax
• Use Cases
• Commands
• Roadmap
• Changelog
• Releases

Getting Started

The main use case for elk is that you are able to run any command/s in a declarative way in any path.

By default the global file that is going to be used is ~/ox.yml. You can change this path if you wish to use another file by setting the env variable ELK_FILE.

elk will first search if there is a ox.yml file in the current directory and use that first, if the file is not found it will use the global file.

This enables the user to have multiples ox.yml one per project while also having one for the system itself.

Installation

Bash

Installation with cURL and sh thanks to the project Go Binaries.

curl -sf https://gobinaries.com/jjzcru/elk | sh

Download

1. Grab the latest binary of your platform from the Releases page.
2. If you are running on macOS or Linux, run chmod +x elk to give executable permissions to the binary. If you are on windows you can ignore this step.
3. Add the binary to $PATH.
4. Run elk version to make sure that the binary is installed.

Syntax

The syntax consists on two main section one is global which sets defaults for all the tasks and the other is tasks which defines the behavior for each of the task.

To learn about the properties go to Syntax Documentation.

Example

version: ‘1’
env_file: /tmp/test.env
env:
  FOO: BAR
tasks:
  hello:
    description: “Print Hello World”
    env:
      FOO: Hello
      BAR: World
    cmds:
      - echo $FOO $BAR

Use Cases

The goal of elk is to run tasks in a declarative way, anything that you could run on your terminal, you can run behind elk. If you handle multiple projects, languages, task or you want to automate your workflow you can use elk to achieve that, just declare you workflow and elk will take care of the rest.

To learn about some use cases for elk go to Use Cases to figure out 😉.

Commands

Command	Description	Syntax
cron	Run one or more task as a cron job ⏱	elk cron [crontab] [tasks] [flags]
exec	Execute ad-hoc commands ⚡	elk exec [commands] [flags]
init	This command creates a dummy file in current directory	elk init [flags]
logs	Attach logs from a task to the terminal 📝	elk logs [task] [flags]
ls	List tasks	elk ls [flags]
run	Run one or more tasks 🤖	elk run [tasks] [flags]
version	Display version number	elk version [flags]
server	Start a graphql server ⚛️	elk server [flags]

Roadmap

Each release has a particular idea in mind and the tasks inside that release are focusing on that main idea.

To learn more about the progress and what is being planned go to Projects.