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just

just is a task runner similar to make, but designed to run project-specific commands, it's not a build system. This allows us to ship common aliases and scripts through one unified command. It can run scripts, accept command line arguments, and gives us the flexibility to ship shared aliases. In Universal Blue we use just to have a set of community maintained aliases because that's a really great cloud-native pattern that we can apply to the desktop.

All uBlue (Universal Blue) images include just and justfiles with quality-of-life commands and other convenient shortcuts that have been submitted by the community. Contributions accepted!

Example Commands

Typing just in the command line will show possible commands and descriptions. Here are some common commands included in the Universal Blue images:

  • just bios - boot into UEFI/bios. Useful for multiple boot systems
  • just changelogs - show a changelog between the running system and the latest updates
  • just clean-system - clean up old containers and packaging metadata
  • just distrobox-<name-of-distro> - E.g. just distrobox-fedora - pre-made distroboxes of common distributions
  • just update - update all packages, flatpaks, and distroboxes

Nvidia Images

  • just nvidia-set-kargs - set boot arguments to blacklist nouveau
  • just nvidia-test-cuda - test CUDA
  • just nvidia-setup-firefox-vaapi - set the flatpak override to get VAAPI working
  • just enroll-secure-boot-key - import boot key used to sign all uBlue built kernel modules

Commands are updated and maintained by the community, feel free to submit a command if you feel it is something that would be useful for all users.

Set up and configuration

just supports include directives under the --unstable flag which is enabled by default with a shell alias set in /etc/profile.d/. If you have a posix-incompatible shell such as fish, you will need to alias just to just --unstable manually or wait until just PR #1588 merges, and you're able to set it as an environment variable instead.

just comes set up with Universal Blue images out of the box. There should be a .justfile in your home directory with the following contents:

!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/00-default.just
!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/10-update.just
!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/20-clean.just
!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/30-distrobox.just
!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/40-nvidia.just
!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/50-akmods.just
!include /usr/share/ublue-os/just/60-custom.just
  • 00-default.just is a justfile available in all main and derived images. It includes common system recipes such as just update.
  • 10-update.just is a justfile available in all main and derived images. It is specifically designed around updating your image and updates your system packages, installed flatpak applications, and containers all at once.
  • 20-clean.just is a justfile available in all main and derived images. It is designed around cleaning your system. Cleans up containers, unused flatpak dependencies, optimises Nix if installed, and cleans up older system deployments.
  • 30-distrobox.just is a justfile available in all main and derived images. It is centered around creating Distrobox containers with ease.
  • 40-nvidia.just is a justfile available in all nvidia and derived images. It includes Nvidia-specific recipes such as just nvidia-set-kargs.
  • 50-akmods.just is a justfile available in nvidia and derived images. It may also be in some speciality images too. It is a layer to add extra kernel modules to the image and is mainly used for better hardware support.
  • 60-custom.just is a justfile available in startingpoint and derived images. It is intended to have recipes provided by the custom image maintainer.

You can in-line more aliases in this file, or add custom includes. The included justfiles are there so that derived images can use the common community pattern while allowing extensibility.

Then you can run just to list available recipes and just <recipename> to execute them. See the ublue-os-just folder in the config-repo or just view the included .just-files for the source code of these recipes.

You can add custom recipes to the justfile in your home directory. Read the documentation on proper syntax.