Need a way to replace just dev to run other commands before ftl dev .

[wesbillman]

Currently, is some of the customer's repo we use just run commands before ftl dev ..

For example that just command might look something like this just dev:

# Start the FTL backend in "dev mode".
dev:
  # Restart when any migrations change.
  watchexec -r -f '**/migrations/*.sql' 'just db-migrate-all && ftl dev backend/modules --recreate'

This will run db migrations before starting ftl dev and rerun both if anything changes.

[alecthomas]

My initial thoughts are that these should go in ftl-project.toml rather than ftl.toml, but I'm not 100% sure. We could start with something super simple though, that just executes commands before building.

[matt2e]

@wesbillman with your example, i wonder if we end up with this issue:

• someone runs dev with some args
• the config says to do something like you mention above that watches and then kicks off dev again
• At some point the person is wondering why dev isnt running with the args they inputed (the pre-run script restarted dev with different args)

[wesbillman]

Oh yeah! My example might be bad since I just copy pasted, but I agree that having a watchexec type command in the rebuild would be pretty wild to debug.

I think a more common case might be something like

[commands]
pre-build = "just db-migrate-all"