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moon v1.23 - Codegen improvements, stack inheritance, internal tasks, and more

· 3 min read
Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson
Founder, developer

It's been a month since our last release, and we're excited to land major codegen and task improvements.

Template & generator improvements​

Based on feedback and requests from community, we've made quite a few improvements to our code generation workflow!

Git and npm template locators​

Our generator.templates setting has only supported file system paths, relative from the workspace root. This has made it quite difficult to share templates across repositories, but no longer!

Template locations now support Git repositories and npm packages, through the git: and npm: prefixes respectively. The git: locator requires a Git repository URL and explicit revision (branch, commit, etc), while the npm: locator requires a package name and explicit version. For example:

moon.yml
generator:
  templates:
    - 'git:github.com/moonrepo/templates#master'
    - 'npm:@moonrepo/templates#1.2.3'

Learn more about this in the official code generation guide!

Custom template names​

Historically, a template's name was derived from the directory the template.yml file was located in. While this works great for small repos, it falls apart for large monorepos when there's multiple teams defining templates, as the chance of name collisions arise.

To combat this problem, we're introducing a new id setting for templates, which allows you to customize the exact name of the template. This setting is optional, and if not provided, the name will be derived from the directory as before.

template.yml
id: 'my-template'

New variable settings​

And lastly, we're introducing some additions and improvements to template variables.

  • A new order setting, which defines the order in which variables are prompted to the user.
  • A new internal setting, which avoids the value being set from the CLI.
  • Enum default values now support a list of values (cannot be provided by the CLI yet).
  • Enum prompts are now optional, and will fallback to the default value if not provided.

Stack-based task inheritance​

Last month in moon v1.22, we introduced the stack setting for organizing projects into what tech stack they belong to. This is primarily for organizational purposes, and improving our project constaints implementation.

Based on community feeedback, we've expanded the stack setting to also apply for task inheritance. You can now inherit tasks for the stack itself, or through a combination of the project language, platform, and type. For example:

  • .moon/tasks/backend.yml
  • .moon/tasks/javascript-backend.yml
  • .moon/tasks/frontend-library.yml
  • .moon/tasks/bun-frontend-application.yml

Internal tasks​

We're introducing a new task mode called internal, which can be enabled with the internal task option. Internal tasks are tasks that are not meant to be ran explicitly by the user (via moon check or moon run), but are used internally as dependencies of other tasks.

This functionality provides another way to organize your tasks.

moon.yml
tasks:
  prepare:
    command: 'intermediate-step'
    options:
      internal: true

Other changes​

View the official release for a full list of changes.

  • Added a variables() function for templates that returns an object of all variables available.
  • Updated moon project and moon task to include the configuration files that tasks inherit from.
  • Updated moon task to include the modes it belongs to.