Cannot invoke task with underscore in method name

[dax-westerman]

Version: 2.2.1

Use Case

Using the example tasks.py...

from invoke.tasks import task


@task
def show_help(c):
    """Show available tasks."""
    print("Available tasks:")
    
@task
def showhelp(c):
    """Show available tasks."""
    print("Available tasks:")

Calling showhelp...

invoke showhelp

prints

Available tasks:

however, calling 'show_help`...

invoke show_help

results in

No idea what 'show_help' is!

[OttoAndrey]

hi! You can see available tasks/commands by

inv -l

and maybe you need call it like

inv show-help

[jbbqqf]

Hi @dax-westerman — drive-by triage: I believe this is working as designed.

Invoke ships with tasks.auto_dash_names: True as a default (invoke/config.py), which means a Python task named show_help is exposed on the CLI as show-help (dashes), not show_help (underscores). So:

invoke show-help    # works
invoke show_help    # not found — this is expected

The behavior is documented in sites/docs/concepts/invoking-tasks.rst under "Dashes vs underscores in flag names", and the toggle is described in sites/docs/concepts/namespaces.rst (set tasks.auto_dash_names: false in invoke.yaml to opt out). @OttoAndrey already pointed this out in their reply.

Probably safe to close. Happy to be corrected if there's a separate bug here I'm missing.

---

Drive-by triage from an outside contributor (data engineer GCP/Python, jbbqqf). Comment drafted with Claude assistance; evidence and conclusion are mine.