In the previous section, we built our first task and executed it. Let's take a look at how the simple conventions work for task runners.
The task run
command will look for a default task name of task.cfc
in the current working directory. The default target (or method) is called run
. Therefore, when you run
you will execute the run()
method of ./task.cfc
relative to your current working directory.
A task is just a CFC file. The task CFCs will extend the commandbox.system.BaseTask
class, but it isn't necessary for your to extend it manually. CommandBox will add in virtual inheritance for you. The task CFCs can live wherever you want in your project (or outside of it!) and can have any name you wish. Since tasks are not scanned and registered by CommandBox, but rather created on-the-fly by convention, you don't have to worry about more than one task in different projects with the same name. That means, each of your projects can have a workbench/build.cfc
task runner and they won't collide. When you run the task, the correct CFC will be located based on your current working directory. Therefore, tasks are not "global" like commands, but rather in the context of a given project or folder.
myTaskName.cfc
To call the above task, we'd reference the path to where the CFC lives. It isn't necessary to include the .cfc
part of the name, though we'll forgive you if you do!
You can have as many targets in your task as you wish, by simply declaring public methods. A task can have no parameters or as many as you like. Default argument values will be used as well. It's just a method execution, but from the command line!
build.cfc
To run each of the targets above, you'd type this:
All CFCs including tasks are created and wired via WireBox, so dependency injection and AOP are available to them. This can be handy for tasks to wrap services provided by models, or to access utilities and services inside CommandBox.
This task would inject CommandBox's ArtifactService to list out all the packages being stored.
Tasks also have a variables.wirebox
variable as well as their own getInstance()
method which proxies to WireBox to get objects.
Task Runners do not execute a application.cfc
or application.cfm
, but you can use the cfapplication tag (or script variant: application
) to modify the properties and behaviors of the Task Runner application. Any setting that can be modified using cfapplication can be modified in Task Runners as follows:
You can also define mappings as follows:
NOTE: The settings that are changed using cfapplication
will last for the duration of the CLI shell and will affect any and all code run from the CLI including the CommandBox core code.
To send email, use the cfscript
variant of cfmail
making sure you set async=false
(see below). Not setting this flag to false
may result in undelivered email because mail may still exist in Lucee spooler (Lucee tasks) when your task runner exits.