FAQ

Why is doit written in all lowercase instead of CamelCase?

At first it would be written in CamelCase DoIt but depending on the font some people would read it as dolt with an L instead of I. So I just set it as lowercase to avoid confusion.

doit is too verbose, why don’t you use decorators?

doit is designed to be extensible. A simple dictionary is actually the most flexible representation. It is possible to create different interfaces on top of it. Check this blog post for some examples.

dodo.py file itself should be a file_dep for all tasks

If I edit my dodo.py file and re-run doit, and my tasks are otherwise up-to-date, the modified tasks are not re-run.

While developing your tasks it is recommended to use doit forget after you change your tasks or use doit --always-run.

In case you really want, you will need to explicitly add the dodo.py in file_dep of your tasks manually.

If dodo.py was an implicit file_dep:

• how would you disable it?

• should imported files from your dodo.py also be a file_dep?

Why file_dep can not depend on a directory/folder?

A file_dep is considered to not be up-to-date when the content of the file changes. But what is a folder change? Some people expect it to be a change in any of its containing files (for this case see question below). Others expect it to be whether the folder exist or not, or if a new file was added or removed from the folder (for these cases you should implement a custom uptodate (check the API).

How to make a dependency on all files in a folder?

file_dep does NOT support folders. If you want to specify all files from a folder you can use a third party library like pathlib ( pathlib was add on python’s 3.4 stdlib).