Dotnet snippets in justfile

In a recent project there were a few dotnet and Docker snippets that I wrapped into Justfile commands which saved me many headaches.

The first runs the project locally. Nothing special. But it also runs a pre-requisite check function which ensures that another service that my project depends on is running. This will not be obvious to a first-time user of my project and this check lets me explicitly warn them that the project dependency is required, avoiding a lot of confusing error messages. It’s also flexible enough that I can run --verbose or any number of additional flags without writing out the entire command.

# runs the program locally
run *ARGS: check
	dotnet run --project .\src\Console\Crawler.csproj {{ARGS}}

The second launches my program inside its Docker container. It needs a user secret and different URL hosts to communicate to its dependent local services. Even though I’ve become adept with Docker commands, typing this whole mess out is a pain.

# starts the Docker container locally
start *ARGS: check
	$secret = (dotnet user-secrets -p .\src\Library\Lib.csproj list).Split("=")[1].Trim(); \
	docker run --rm -it --env CrawlerClientSecret=$secret ptcp/regulatory-crawler:latest ./Crawler --environment docker {{ARGS}}

The third uses NSwag to generate an authenticated machine-to-machine client. What I discovered along the way, however, is that, while you can pass the project .csproj file via a CLI argument, NSwag isn’t smart enough to put the new client code in that project’s directory. Very frustrating when the CLI reports success but nothing changes because it’s updated the wrong file. Am I going to remember this detail? Definitely not. But with a simple pushd;popd I don’t need to.

# refreshes M2M client
refresh: check
	pushd src/Library; dotnet openapi refresh 'http://localhost:5700/swagger/m2m/swagger.json'; popd