Built-in Commands

Mill comes with a number of useful commands out of the box. These are listed in the API Docs:

mill.main.MainModule

Mill’s built-in commands are typically not directly related to building your application code, but instead are utilities that help you understand and work with your Mill build.

The following examples will be assuming the build.mill file given below:

build.mill (download, browse)

package build
import mill._, javalib._

trait MyModule extends JavaModule {
  object test extends JavaTests with TestModule.Junit4
}

object foo extends MyModule {
  def moduleDeps = Seq(bar)
  def ivyDeps = Agg(
    ivy"net.sourceforge.argparse4j:argparse4j:0.9.0"
  )
}

object bar extends MyModule {
  def ivyDeps = Agg(
    ivy"net.sourceforge.argparse4j:argparse4j:0.9.0",
    ivy"org.thymeleaf:thymeleaf:3.1.1.RELEASE"
  )
}

resolve

resolve lists the tasks that match a particular query, without running them. This is useful for "dry running" an mill command to see what would be run before you run them, or to explore what modules or tasks are available from the command line using resolve _, resolve foo._, etc.

> mill resolve _
foo
bar
clean
inspect
path
plan
resolve
show
shutdown
version
visualize
visualizePlan

> mill resolve _.compile
foo.compile
bar.compile

> mill resolve foo._
foo.allSourceFiles
foo.allSources
foo.artifactId
foo.artifactName
...

You can also use the wildcards _ as a placeholder for a single segment and __ as a placeholder for many segments. Lists within curly braces ({, }) are also supported.

> mill resolve foo.{compile,run}
> mill resolve "foo.{compile,run}"
> mill resolve foo.compile foo.run
> mill resolve _.compile  # list the compile tasks for every top-level module
> mill resolve __.compile # list the compile tasks for every module
> mill resolve _          # list every top level module and task
> mill resolve foo._      # list every task directly within the foo module
> mill resolve __         # list every module and task recursively

See the documentation for Task Query Syntax for more details what you can pass to resolve

inspect

inspect is a more verbose version of resolve. In addition to printing out the name of one-or-more tasks, it also displays its source location and a list of input tasks. This is very useful for debugging and interactively exploring the structure of your build from the command line.

> mill inspect foo.run
foo.run(RunModule...)
    Runs this module's code in a subprocess and waits for it to finish
    args <str>...
Inputs:
    foo.finalMainClass
    foo.finalMainClassOpt
    foo.runClasspath
    foo.forkArgs
    foo.forkEnv
    foo.forkWorkingDir
    foo.runUseArgsFile

While inspect also works with the same _/__ wildcard/query syntax that resolve do, the most common use case is to inspect one task at a time.

show

By default, Mill does not print out the metadata from evaluating a task. Most people would not be interested in e.g. viewing the metadata related to incremental compilation: they just want to compile their code! However, if you want to inspect the build to debug problems, you can make Mill show you the metadata output for a task using the show command. e.g. if it seems source files are not getting picked up, you can show foo.sources to see where Mill is looking for the foo module’s source files:

> mill show foo.sources
[
  ".../foo/src"
]

> mill show foo.allSourceFiles
[
  ".../foo/src.../Foo..."
]

show is not just for showing configuration values. All tasks return values that can be shown with show. E.g. compile returns the paths to the classes folder and analysisFile file produced by the compilation:

> mill show foo.compile
{
  "analysisFile": ".../out/foo/compile.dest/...",
  "classes": ".../out/foo/compile.dest/classes"
}

show is also useful for interacting with Mill from external tools, since the JSON it outputs is structured and easily parsed and manipulated. You can easily pipe the show output into a python script or jq to manipulate it further.

When show is used with multiple task, its output will slightly change to a JSON dictionary, with the keys being the task names and the values being the JSON results of the given task.

> mill show 'foo.{sources,compileClasspath}'
{
  "foo.sources": [
    ".../foo/src"
  ],
  "foo.compileClasspath": [
    ...
    ".../foo/compile-resources"
  ]
}

showNamed

Same as show, but the output will always be structured in a JSON dictionary, whether there is one or more task in the selection

> mill showNamed 'foo.sources'
{
  "foo.sources": [
    ".../foo/src"
  ]
}

> mill showNamed 'foo.{sources,compileClasspath}'
{
  "foo.sources": [
    ".../foo/src"
  ],
  "foo.compileClasspath": [
    ...
    ".../foo/compile-resources"
  ]
}

This can make it easier to programmatically work with the output of running one-or-more tasks via Mill wildcard queries, since the {"<task-name>": <output>} structure remains the same regardless of how many values the query returns.

path

mill path prints out a dependency chain between the first task and the second. It is very useful for exploring the build graph and trying to figure out how data gets from one task to another, or trying to figure out why running mill foo ends up running another task bar that you didn’t expect it to.

> mill path foo.assembly foo.sources
foo.sources
foo.allSources
foo.allSourceFiles
foo.compile
foo.finalMainClassOpt
foo.prependShellScript
foo.assembly

If there are multiple possible dependency chains, one of them is picked arbitrarily.

plan

mill plan foo shows which tasks would be evaluated if you ran mill foo, and in what order, but without actually running them. This is a useful tool for debugging your build: e.g. if you suspect a task foo is running things that it shouldn’t be running, a quick mill plan will list out all the upstream tasks that foo needs to run, and you can then follow up with mill path on any individual upstream task to see exactly how foo depends on it.

> mill plan foo.compileClasspath
foo.transitiveCompileClasspath
foo.compileResources
foo.unmanagedClasspath
...
foo.compileIvyDeps
...
foo.ivyDeps
foo.transitiveIvyDeps
foo.compileClasspath

due to parallelism, the given order is only one possible toplogical order that the tasks will be started. Tasks may be started in different orders depending on scheduling considerations, and may finish in a different order due to differences in time taken to run

clean

clean deletes all the cached outputs of previously executed tasks.

> mill clean

clean without arguments cleans the entire project. It also accepts arguments to clean specific modules, or specific tasks.

> mill clean             # clean all outputs
> mill clean foo         # clean all outputs for module 'foo' (including nested modules)
> mill clean foo.compile # only clean outputs for task 'compile' in module 'foo'
> mill clean foo.{compile,run}
> mill clean "foo.{compile,run}"
> mill clean foo.compile foo.run
> mill clean _.compile
> mill clean __.compile

visualize

> mill visualize foo._
[
  ".../out/visualize.dest/out.dot",
  ".../out/visualize.dest/out.json",
  ".../out/visualize.dest/out.png",
  ".../out/visualize.dest/out.svg",
  ".../out/visualize.dest/out.txt"
]

mill visualize takes a subset of the Mill build graph (e.g. core._ is every task directly under the core module) and draws out their relationships in .svg and .png form for you to inspect. It also generates .txt, .dot and .json for easy processing by downstream tools.

visualize can be very handy for trying to understand the dependency graph of tasks within your Mill build: who depends on what? Who do I need to override to affect a particular task? Which tasks depend on another and need to run sequentially, and which do not and can be run in parallel?

The above command visualizes all the tasks within the foo module, and generates the following diagram to show you how they are related to one another (right-click open in new tab to see full sized):

The above example shows the outcome of using visualize on multiple tasks within a single module, but you can also use visualize on a single task in multiple modules to see how they are related:

> mill visualize __.compile

> cat out/visualize.dest/out.dot
digraph "example1" {
graph ["rankdir"="LR"]
"bar.compile" ["style"="solid","shape"="box"]
"bar.test.compile" ["style"="solid","shape"="box"]
"foo.compile" ["style"="solid","shape"="box"]
"foo.test.compile" ["style"="solid","shape"="box"]
"bar.compile" -> "foo.compile"
"bar.compile" -> "bar.test.compile"
"foo.compile" -> "foo.test.compile"
}

visualize does a Transitive Reduction of the graph when rendering it. This removes redundant edges and simplifies the graph so it’s easier to visualize while preserving the overall structure of the graph, but it does mean that there will be some duplicate edges that are not shown.

visualizePlan

> mill visualizePlan foo.run
[
  ".../out/visualizePlan.dest/out.dot",
  ".../out/visualizePlan.dest/out.json",
  ".../out/visualizePlan.dest/out.png",
  ".../out/visualizePlan.dest/out.svg",
  ".../out/visualizePlan.dest/out.txt"
]

mill visualizePlan is similar to mill visualize except that it shows a graph of the entire build plan, including tasks not directly resolved by the query. Tasks directly resolved are shown with a solid border, and dependencies are shown with a dotted border.

The above command generates the following diagram (right-click open in new tab to see full sized):

init

> mill init
Run `mill init <example-id>` with one of these examples as an argument to download and extract example.
Run `mill init --show-all` to see full list of examples.
Run `mill init <Giter8 template>` to generate project from Giter8 template.
...
scalalib/basic/1-simple
...
scalalib/web/1-todo-webapp
scalalib/web/2-webapp-cache-busting
scalalib/web/3-scalajs-module
scalalib/web/4-webapp-scalajs
scalalib/web/5-webapp-scalajs-shared
...
javalib/basic/1-simple
...
javalib/basic/6-realistic
...
javalib/web/1-hello-jetty
javalib/web/2-hello-spring-boot
javalib/web/3-todo-spring-boot
javalib/web/4-hello-micronaut
javalib/web/5-todo-micronaut
kotlinlib/basic/1-simple
...
kotlinlib/basic/6-realistic
...
kotlinlib/web/1-hello-ktor

The init command generates a project based on a Mill example project or a Giter8 template. You can use it to quickly generate a starter project. There are lots of templates out there for many frameworks and tools!

The typical usage of init is to download a bootstrap script into an empty folder and run ./mill init to download and unpack one of the example projects closest to what you want into the empty folder. Even though the example project isn’t going to be everything that you need, at least it’ll get most of the tedious boilerplate set up, so you can hit the group running working on the things that are unique to your particular project.