I recently started using Invoke to automate common tasks for my projects, such as building and deploying documentation pages. Naturally, I started using Invoke to maintain this blog, so here's a quick guide on how to use Invoke.

What's invoke?

Invoke is a Python library for managing shell-oriented tasks. It was inspired by Ruby's Rake, which is a tool designed to write Makefiles using Ruby. The main advantages Rake provided over simple Makefiles is that they are easier to write, and extremely versatile, as you have the whole Ruby programming language to describe tasks.

Invoke is similar to Rake, in that it attempts to provide an alternative to Makefiles for automating tasks. Similarly to Rake, Invoke provides full Python to describe and automate tasks.

How to use invoke

You first need to install invoke, you can install it globally using pip:

pip install invoke

However, and I have written before, I like to use poetry to manage virtual environments an dependencies, so I just add invoke as a "dev" dependency to my projects:

poetry add --group dev invoke

Now that you have invoke available, you need to create a tasks.py file on your project's root directory. The tasks.py …