Run custom task automatically before/after standard task - scala

Question

I often want to do some customization before one of the standard tasks are run. I realize I can make new tasks that executes existing tasks in the order I want, but I find that cumbersome and the chance that a developer misses that he is supposed to run my-compile instead of compile is big and leads to hard to fix errors.
So I want to define a custom task (say prepare-app) and inject it into the dependency tree of the existing tasks (say package-bin) so that every time someone invokes package-bin my custom tasks is run right before it.
I tried doing this
def mySettings = {
inConfig(Compile)(Seq(prepareAppTask <<= packageBin in Compile map { (pkg: File) =>
// fiddle with the /target folder before package-bin makes it into a jar
})) ++
Seq(name := "my project", version := "1.0")
}
lazy val prepareAppTask = TaskKey[Unit]("prepare-app")
but it's not executed automatically by package-bin right before it packages the compile output into a jar. So how do I alter the above code to be run at the right time ?
More generally where do I find info about hooking into other tasks like compile and is there a general way to ensure that your own tasks are run before and after a standard tasks are invoked ?.

Answer 1

Extending an existing task is documented the SBT documentation for Tasks (look at the section Modifying an Existing Task).
Something like this:
compile in Compile <<= (compile in Compile) map { _ =>
// what you want to happen after compile goes here
}
Actually, there is another way - define your task to depend on compile
prepareAppTask := (whatever you want to do) dependsOn compile
and then modify packageBin to depend on that:
packageBin <<= packageBin dependsOn prepareAppTask
(all of the above non-tested, but the general thrust should work, I hope).

Answer 2

As an update for the previous answer by #Paul Butcher, this could be done in a bit different way in SBT 1.x versions since <<== is no longer supported. I took an example of a sample task to run before the compilation that I use in one of my projects:
lazy val wsdlImport = TaskKey[Unit]("wsdlImport", "Generates Java classes from WSDL")
wsdlImport := {
import sys.process._
"./wsdl/bin/wsdl_import.sh" !
// or do whatever stuff you need
}
(compile in Compile) := ((compile in Compile) dependsOn wsdlImport).value
This is very similar to how it was done before 1.x.
Also, there is another way suggested by official SBT docs, which is basically a composition of tasks (instead of dependencies hierarchy). Taking the same example as above:
(compile in Compile) := {
val w = wsdlImport.value
val c = (compile in Compile).value
// you can add more tasks to composition or perform some actions with them
c
}
It feels like giving more flexibility in some cases, though the first example looks a bit neater, as for me.
Tested on SBT 1.2.3 but should work with other 1.x as well.