Hi everyone, is it possible to somehow combine the

run

goal with

--changed-since

? When trying to, I'm faced with the error

TooManyTargetsException: The `run` goal only works with one valid target, but was given multiple valid targets

So I am wondering whether there's any way to achieve this in a different fashion. The use case would be to run some

adhoc_tool

or script when its dependencies change

Are you looking for

--loop

The use case would be to run some

adhoc_tool

or script when its dependencies change

loop is based on file-watching

I'm thinking more about adding a tool via

adhoc_tool

instead of writing a plugin, which I would then like to run whenever some files it depends on change.

So, I still don't get this. Are you trying to no-op if nothing has changed (locally)?

yes correct. And by changed I'm talking about the git-level changes, like is done with the

--changed-since

flag

gotcha, I thought adhoc_tool has some check for that - but I might be remembering a caching function

yes. It deploys infrastructure as code.

Let me look through some of my code, I have a deployment tool as well - but I can't recall where I handle the determination of WHEN to call it. Re: adhoc_tool, hard to say - but in my personal opinion, I would default to

adhoc_tool

unless there's some specific reason it won't work. Writing and maintaining a plugin is more time consuming in general. For example, I have an adhoc_tool that builds my SvelteKit repo and then zips and deploys Azure to because we don't have TS support baked-in just yet, and the rest of it would otherwise be a shell command

it does have some info:

The level of initial effort involved in using

adhoc_tool

is significantly lower than that of writing a plugin, so it's well-suited to consuming one-off scripts, or for rapidly prototyping a process before actually writing a plugin. The tradeoff is that there is more manual work involved in defining build processes that reflect your codebase's structure, and that the targets that define the tools you consume are less easy to reuse.

In your specific case.... What about an alias or bash script that does the git checking, if we can't do it directly in pants right now (I'd need to look around my repos for a while, I have a ton of pants code floating around)

yeah that would work initially. It could traverse the dependencies and check for changes in git. But then it sounds like I'm reinventing the

--changed-since

feature of Pants 😄

Ahh, okay, so looking for specific changes for that given command - not just any changes

indeed, files related to that command

Can you show me the full command that would give you what you're expecting?

I don't fully understand. Do you want me to send you the Pants command I would like to run?

Sure

well I started with something like this

pants --changed-since=HEAD^ run

This does not work, and if it would, it would run way too much, so I would need to filter this down somehow to the

adhoc_tools

that matter here

Yeah, so what I mean is, using something like

pants --changed-since=HEAD list | something?

or something else more bash-y

hmm yeah that would actually work

Probably need some sort of transitive check? And then to make it easier, wrap it into a pants alias (or bash alias I guess)

yeah there is a

--check-dependents=transitive

option I can add

No prob! I'm a bit rusty, haven't had to dig into much outside of my "just works" wheelhouse in a while

awesome, yeah this is the glue that I was missing in some places. Thanks for sharing 😄