footman 0.8.0

A task runner with typed commands, nested groups, and instant shell completion.

footman

A task runner with the soul of duty and the UX of typer: typed function signatures become real flags and positionals, modules become nested command groups, independent tasks run in parallel by default, and shell completion answers from a cached manifest in ~20 ms — without importing your code.

Ships two console scripts, footman and the two-letter fm. Zero runtime dependencies. Python 3.11+.

[!WARNING] Very early code. footman is alpha and moving fast — the public API, the decorator surface, the manifest format, and the CLI grammar can all change without notice or a deprecation cycle. Pin an exact version if you build on it.

Why

duty got a lot right — the run() capture model, the decorator ergonomics — and footman keeps those ideas. Where it pushes is the parts that compound: completion served from a cache instead of re-importing your project on every TAB (~15× faster, measured), eager type and choice validation with errors that teach, a DAG scheduler that runs independent tasks concurrently (the same four-step check lands ~4× sooner than duty or invoke, measured), a monorepo cascade that merges a tasks.py per folder, and a first-party story for testing your tasks. The receipts live in the comparison — every number reproducible from comparison/.

Taste

uv add --dev footman        # or: pip install footman

# tasks.py
from footman import task, group, run, tools

@task
def lint(fix: bool = False):
    "Run ruff over the project."
    tools.ruff.check("src", fix=fix)

@task(pre=[lint])
def test(*pytest_args):
    "Run the test suite (extra args after --)."
    tools.pytest(*pytest_args)

docs = group("docs", help="Documentation")

@docs.task
def serve(port: int = 8000):
    "Serve the docs locally."
    run(f"mkdocs serve -a localhost:{port}")

$ fm lint --fix
$ fm lint test docs serve --port 8001   # one chain; independent tasks run in parallel
$ fm test -- -k grammar -x              # everything after -- goes to pytest
$ fm deploy produ
fm: deploy: <target> must be one of dev|staging|prod (got 'produ') — did you mean 'prod'?
$ fm --install-completion               # detects your shell; TAB answers in ~20 ms

Learn more

Documentation — start with Getting started, then the good parts: typed signatures · chaining & parallelism · monorepos · composing tasks · running tools · testing your tasks · completion · CI & automation · comparison with duty / invoke / poe / typer

MIT licensed. The road to 1.0 lives in ROADMAP.md.