Task runner plugin system

[rmorshea]

In my projects that use uv I've developed a pattern (which I've encoded in a template repo) where I define a script called dev.py that uses click to define a CLI and automate common tasks (e.g. running tests, building docs and linting). With that in mind it would be nice if it were possible to define a "default script" so that, instead of typing uv run dev.py ..., I could avoid typing dev.py each time and use a shorter command a la yarn run or npm run which inherit commands from the scripts section of package.json. Since uv run wouldn't be suitable for this due to the fact that positional arguments would be confused with executables, an alternative command like uv do ... would be necessary. A hypothetical configuration could look something like:

[tool.uv.do]
command = "uv run dev.py"

I understand this might be considered relatively niche, however I could imagine a feature like this negating the need for UV to develop it's own system for defining and executing "user scripts" as other package managers in the Python space have (e.g. Hatch's and PDM's approaches). Instead, UV could defer to existing tools in the Python ecosystem for this like Nox or Invoke.

[FishAlchemist]

Although the expected format is different, does this issue(#5903) function as you expected?

[zanieb]

Interesting, this sounds like an implementation of #5903 that just invokes a third-party tool? Sort of a plugin system?

[rmorshea]

@zanieb I think it could function that way. Put another way, I'm proposing that UV provide a command for projects to alias in whatever way they might want.

Taking the initial taskipy example from #5903 you could configure:

[dependency-groups]
dev = ["taskipy"]

[tool.uv.do]
command = "uv run task"

[tool.taskipy.tasks]
hello = "echo Hello from taskipy!"

Any then run:

uv do hello

I see two main advantages of this approach has over #5903:

• If you choose to use another tool to manage your scripts you don't need to ensure you've copied them both under [tool.uv.tasks] and that tool's configuration location of choice. To me, having a bunch of "tasks" which look like uv run uvx --from=rust-just just <the-task> seems redundant and annoying to maintain. Instead, under this proposal you could simply configure:

  [tool.uv.do]
  command = "uv run uvx --from=rust-just just"

• As mentioned above, UV doesn't need to develop and maintain a task running system that will inevitably grow in scope and complexity. While choosing not to provide a task runner out of the box might not conform to people's expectations, I think it could be pretty easily addressed with a short and easily discoverable section of documentation that provides a recommended solution for people to copy-paste into their projects.

[rmorshea]

One downside of this proposal vs #5903 is that new contributors to a project that uses UV won't always be able to look for the same tool.uv.tasks configuration to find the set of common commands they might want to run.

[rmorshea]

@zanieb would you recommend closing this issue in favor of #5903?