Explicit Skips

Behaviour#

Repository commands are written to run wherever the repository is checked out. Some of what they cover is optional: a linter that is only installed in the dev container, a link checker the repository may not have, Terraform roots that may not exist yet, a plugin download that needs the network. Rather than fail on the first absent piece, or silently do nothing, each step announces that it did not run.

The prefix is the contract. Anything that reads the log — a person, a CI summary, a grep — can find every step that was not exercised by looking for skip: at the start of a line, and can trust that the exit status still reflects every check that did run.

Three outcomes, three words#

missing: belongs to diagnostics and to commands that cannot do their job at all. make format exists to rewrite files, so without Prettier it prints missing: root npm dependencies; rebuild the devcontainer or run npm ci and exits 1. The lint gate, by contrast, treats an absent Prettier as a skip, because a gate in a bare checkout should still run every other linter.

Where skips come from#

• Tools not installed. The shared run helper in scripts/lint.sh and scripts/security-scan.sh checks command -v first.
• Components not present. Hugo and Terraform targets skip when none of the declared directories exist: skip: no Hugo sites (directories not found).
• Optional configuration not set. An empty HUGO_PREPARE_COMMAND, a missing scripts/check-links.mjs, or no LINT_COMMAND each print their own line, such as skip: no link checker configured.
• No input to work on. The docs stager prints skip: no docs/ directory; the Node restore hook prints skip: no root package.json.
• Network deliberately off. Under Offline Validation , plugin and provider downloads skip and validation continues with what is cached.

Examples#

The lint gate’s runner is the whole pattern in a few lines:

run() {
	local name="$1"
	shift
	if ! command -v "$1" > /dev/null 2>&1; then
		printf 'skip: %s is not installed\n' "$1"
		return 0
	fi
	printf '\n--- %s ---\n' "$name"
	"$@" || failed=1
}

The same shape appears outside shell scripts. The documentation stager exits cleanly when there is nothing to stage:

try {
  readdirSync(DOCS_DIR);
} catch {
  console.log("skip: no docs/ directory");
  process.exit(0);
}