How to chain tasks in Visual Studio Code using only tasks.json?

Question

I have been ploughing through the documentation of Visual Studio Code to figure out how to add multiple consecutive tasks to the tasks.json file.

The tasks array only allows for creating different arguments to the same command. In this example the command is echo.

{
    "version": "0.1.0",
    "command": "echo",
    "isShellCommand": true,
    "args": [],
    "showOutput": "always",
    "echoCommand": true,
    "suppressTaskName": true,
    "tasks": [
        {
            "taskName": "hello",
            "args": ["Hello World"]
        },
        {
            "taskName": "bye",
            "args": ["Good Bye"]
        }
    ]
}

Does tasks.json allow several tasks to be executed consecutively? For example, tsc followed by uglify?

Answer 1

The dependsOn feature was shipped in version 1.10.0. For example, I am using this to compile and run single file scripts in TypeScript:

{
    "version": "2.0.0",
    "tasks": [
        {
            "command": "tsc -p ${cwd}/2017-play",
            "label": "tsc-compile",
            "type": "shell"
        },
        {
            "command": "node ${cwd}/2017-play/build/${fileBasenameNoExtension}.js",
            "label": "node-exec",
            "type": "shell",
            "dependsOn": [
                "tsc-compile"
            ],
            "problemMatcher": []
        }
    ]
}