Make task hidden from user, but callable from inside the Taskfile

[ghost]

This might be useful for tasks preparing something, called from multiple other tasks.
Hiding the task from the user, eg. its not callable like task <hidden_task>, when the preparing stuff is not useful on its own.

[andreynering]

Hi @StevenKL,

You mean, like, private tasks? That was proposed before on #284.

I don't have a strong opinion on it.

[ghost]

Hello @andreynering,

just exactly like described in #284.
In the other Hand, we could usw a simple multiline script in a variable. But this meens We must call it every time. With a hidden task we can use its features like status or preconditions, also source and generates.

But i also think the user oft my Taskfile should be able to see that there is another, hidden/private task runnable.

As i think of it, is there an option to use a variable as precondition?
For example a RUN_IT: true for the hidden task and a simple precondition to evaluate that.

[andreynering]

As i think of it, is there an option to use a variable as precondition?
For example a RUN_IT: true for the hidden task and a simple precondition to evaluate that.

Can you elaborate on that? I couldn't get what you mean.

[ghost]

Hello again,

my initial thought was to hide some tasks that do the heavy lifting and just export some control tasks.
Think of it just like a module in go with exported members.

I'm trying to use these Taskfiles as an interface for configuring and deploying our internal services and applications.

I want our employees to just hit task install or task update start without knowing what exactly is needed to do. Especially for a task like update, that is preparing containers and volumes to be saved/exported/what else in the background. It's just an example, but i hope you get what i mean.

But currently i don't know if this is enough for my use case. It might be also a practical idea to share some state between tasks. Something like mutable global vars, for example. But that's another story 😉

[tommyalatalo]

I second this request, there are definitely use cases for importing a taskfile and having only some of the tasks exposed while some are hidden private/support tasks.

[marco-m]

If I understand correctly, something similar is already obtainable simply by not adding a desc or summary attribute to the task. To make it even clearer than one is not supposed to call the task directly, you could prefix them with an underscore: _foo (or am I missing something?).

Yes, it is only a convention, but IMHO a good-enough trade-off, that would keep task simpler. To make an example, Python doesn't have private methods :-)

[tylermmorton]

Is this issue OK to close with the suggested workaround and the duplicate mentioned in #284? Perhaps an action item coming out of this could be to document the workaround in the usage docs file under a heading that is easily searchable like "Private Tasks" or "Hiding Tasks in task -l"

[kerma]

This is now covered with the help section and --list-all flag: https://github.com/go-task/task/blob/master/docs/usage.md#help

Please file a new issue if you feel like the docs need work on this.