When Nathan Fischer was evaluating the mill build tool in 2019 for Lightform's Scala backend, there were some typical plugins that just weren't available out of the box. In particular was the ability to build and publish a Docker image, as well as running Flyway database schema migrations. For a startup, the overhead of creating plugins like this would be too high when combined with the learning curve of a new build tool. But with mill it was so approachable that Nathan built both of those plugins and contributed them to the mill project and went on to use mill to great effect at Lightform.

In this talk we'll review mill's Task model and how it can be used to make these plugins.

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