Runnin' In The Streets! CommandBox Task Runners For The Real World

Recently CommandBox added a new feature called Task Runners to let you “run ColdFusion code”. That doesn’t sound exciting but it’s really quite useful.  Now we can use CommandBox and CFML to replace our Ant scripts, Gulp tasks, CRON jobs, shell scripts, and so on! With Task Runners, not only can your entire application be CFML but the build scripts, nightly batch processes, shell scripts and tons more can also be written and managed in CFML. Goodbye, super cryptic Perl file that we’ve blindly been running for 20 years! Let’s replace it all with CFML!

Target Audience: Developers that have used CommandBox at least a tiny bit but don’t know what else to do with it beyond starting local CF dev servers. Any project that includes scheduled tasks or has several manual deployment steps will benefit from this session. Also, anyone looking to replace Gulp or ANT with a CFML solution will find some valuable information here.

Assumed Knowledge: We’ll assume developers have an understanding of the CFML language and have previously installed CommandBox on at least a development machine. No experience with other tooling is required. All of the examples will work on any CFML application. The code does not have to be a well structured MVC application. You'll get the same benefits when applying this information to older legacy CFML applications as well.

Main takeaways:

• What is a Task Runner and what do they do?
• How do I make my first Task Runner?
• What other real world things can they do?
• How are Task Runners different from Commands?
• Connecting things like linters and code watchers.