Task aliases

Alternate names for a task. Useful for short CLI invocations (rite b vs rite build) or for renaming a task without breaking callers.

Basics

version: '3'

tasks:
  build:
    aliases: [b, compile]
    cmds:
      - go build ./...

All three work:

rite build
rite b
rite compile

Aliases behave identically to the primary name — they show in --list, in --summary, in tab-completion, and in task: call sites.

Renaming without breaking callers

When you rename a task, keep the old name as an alias for a release or two:

tasks:
  ci:
    aliases: [test-ci]    # old name, kept for Jenkins, CI configs, muscle memory
    cmds:
      - go test ./...

Nobody's pipeline breaks. Drop the alias when you've had time to update the callers.

Alias collisions

Two tasks can't share the same name or alias — rite rejects the Ritefile at parse time if a collision would make a name ambiguous. This includes aliases across included files (with namespacing): lib:foo and lib:f are both fine, but two aliases called f in the same scope are not.

Includes

Includes themselves take aliases too:

includes:
  mobile:
    taskfile: ./mobile
    aliases: [m, mob]

tasks:
  release:
    cmds:
      - task: mobile:build
      - task: m:sign      # same target, shorter namespace

The include alias is a drop-in replacement for the include's name at call sites.