boostbuild

Boost

Boost is a simple build system that aims to create an interface for shell command substitution across different operative systems. Boost tries to centralize build steps on different development environments.

Boost adds a simple way to add custom commands with different behaviours for different platforms.

Commands

A command is a group of functions which determines the behaviour of an action on different environments. A command needs to implement these functions:

• generic_exec(args: List[str]) -> dict: function if the code is the same across multiple platforms or
• win_exec(args: List[str]) -> dict: for Windows commands.
• posix_exec(args: List[str]) -> dict: for Posix commands.

Currently, commands files under cmd package which implement above deffined functions can be automatically used by its file name. For example, boost.cmd.delete can be used inside any boost.yaml boost targets by using the keyword delete.

Using Boost

To use Boost, first, create a boost.yaml file in your project directory. This is an example of a simple boost file.

vars:
  file: example.txt
  current_dir: exec pwd
boost:
  dev: |
    delete {file}
    asd {current_dir}

• vars: Define key-value pairs representing variables that needs to be used inside boost targets. If a variable needs to store the output from a command, use exec followed by the commands that needs to be captured.
• boost: Define key-value pairs named boost targets. Target key will be used to call that specific target. Value contains a list of commands separated by \n that will be triggered when calling a specific target. If a value needs to use a variable, use $ followed by the variable name that was previously declared on vars section.

To call a boost target, run boost <TARGET>. If no boost target was specified, boost will use the first defined target.

Developing boost

Requirements:

• poetry

Run poetry install. Whit the previous command, you can run poetry run boost to test boost, boost command does automatically trigger boostbuild.main:main function.