Task Runner Census 2025

Summary

Jul 13, 2025 Task Runner Census 2025 TL;DR - Key Take-aways GitHub Actions dominates CI/CD, Make is omnipresent, and new package managers like uv and pnpm are popular in new repos. How and why I counted Every software project accretes snippets of code for developers to execute that are outside the primary codebase. These are named and saved in shell scripts, configs for build tools, package managers, CI runners, and occasionally just code blocks in the README. To find out what people are actually doing in 2025, I crawled the 100,000 most starred repos on GitHub and checked what config files they had. The primary motivation was figuring out what I should support in dela, my delegating task runner. The Leaderboards Most used task runners Of the top 100,000 starred repos, 72,804 had detectable task runners. For repo counts, y axis is the total number of repos in which a task runner was detected. For star counts, y axis is the cumulative sum of stars in the detected repos. To be included in the chart, the task runner had to appear in at least 100 repos. Most used since 2025-01-01 Below are charts only for the repositories created since 2025-01-01 that feature in the top 100k starred repositories. 1,127 repositories made this year have made it into the top 100k most starred repos overall. To be included in the chart, the task runner also had to appear in at least 10 of those repositories. A taxonomy of task runners There is a continuum of tooling that can execute code, but not all executions could be considered tasks. My criteria is that the tool is meant to work with the repository and has well-known patterns that could be detected from filenames. This means that things like Python scripts and shell scripts are out because their domain of utility can’t be localized to the repository. Any code that is meant to be run by the user rather than by the developer is also out, such as arg parsers for CLI tools. GitHub Actions, on the other hand, are included because they deal w...