Werk Build System And Command Runner

werk is a simplistic and opinionated command runner, similar to just, and also a simplistic build system, similar to make.

You Betta Werk! 💅

Caution

Werk is early alpha software. Use at your own risk. It may eat your files, so run git commit before trying it out.

Why?

GNU make is extremely useful, but very hard to use correctly, especially if you have modern expectations of your build system, and you just want a convenient way to execute build scripts, create asset packs, or run housekeeping tasks in your project.

just is also extremely useful, and easy to use, but cannot build files. It can only run commands, delegating to make, cargo, or other build systems to actually produce output. Furthermore, it can be difficult to write cross-platform Justfiles, usually relying on a platform-specific shell availability.

For mode details, consult the the book.

Installation instructions

werk can currently only be installed from source, which requires that you have Rust and Cargo installed.

• Clone this repository.
• Run cargo install --path werk-cli.
• Ensure that your $PATH contains the path to Cargo binaries. This is usually the case if you have a working installation of Rust and Cargo.
  • Cargo installs binaries in $CARGO_HOME/bin.
  • On UNIX-like systems, the default install location is $HOME/.cargo/bin.
  • On Windows, the default install location is %USERPROFILE%\.cargo\bin.

Language Support for VS Code

• Clone this repository.
• Install the extension from werk-vscode:
  • From the command-line: code --install-extension <path-to-werk-vscode>
  • From within VS Code: Run "Developer: Install Extension from Location..." and point it to the path to the werk-vscode directory within this repository.

Language Support for Zed

• Clone this repository
• Install the extension from zed-werk:
  • From within Zed: Run "zed: install dev extension" and point it to the path to the zed-werk directory within this repository.

Features and limitations

See Features and limitations.

Project non-goals

• werk will probably never be fastest.
  1. User friendliness is always higher priority.
  2. Reporting "no changes" quickly is specifically not a goal. Use Ninja if this is important to you. Typically, werk is invoked when the user has actually made changes.
  3. That said, werk does try to be reasonably fast, and is implemented in Rust using best practices.
• werk will probably never support all use cases.
  1. It is designed to support the use cases that are important to me, the author.
  2. The needs of build systems are vast and varied. Use the one that fits your purposes, or file a feature request if you believe that werk would be greater if it could reasonably support it.
• werk will never be a scripting language. It is strictly declarative with minimal support for logic and expressions, but doesn't have (and won't have) loop constructs.

Examples

See Examples.

Roadmap

• IDE integration to run individual tasks.
• WASM host support.

LLM transparency statement

Werk is designed and written by humans, with very limited use of LLMs.

1. Design and implementation of all major components is done by humans.
2. LLMs have been used at the "auto-complete" level within the main components, and all LLM output has been carefully reviewed.
3. LLMs have been used to give feedback about and review certain aspects of the code. Humans have verified and reacted to the feedback.
4. Certain minor components have been developed by LLMs, especially around terminal output formatting.
5. The Zed extension and tree-sitter parser has been fully authored by Claude Opus 4.7 based on Werk's native parser, and carefully reviewed before being published.

If any piece of this project violates the copyright of any author through the use of LLMs and their unattributed training data, such violation is unintentional and will be fixed as soon as possible, either through attribution or removal of the offending code. Please don't hesitate to report any such violations.