microbuild - Lightweight Python Build Tool.

Calum J. Eadie (www.calumjeadie.com)

Features

• Really quick to learn.
• Manages dependancies between tasks.
• Automatically generates a command line interface.

Related projects

Check out pynt, microbuild's beefier younger brother. Raghunandan Rao has extended microbuild, adding features including:

• Rake style parameter passing to tasks.
• Running tasks by typing the first few characters.
• Breaking up script into modules.

Installation

You can install microbuild from the Python Package Index (PyPI) or from source.

Using pip:

$ pip install microbuild

Using easy_install:

$ easy_install microbuild

Example

The build script is written in pure Python and microbuild takes care of managing any dependancies between tasks and generating a command line interface.

Tasks are just regular Python functions marked with the @task() decorator. Dependancies are specified with @task() too. Tasks can be ignored with the @ignore decorator.

After defining all tasks build(sys.modules[__name__],sys.argv[1:]) is called to run the build.

# example.py
import sys
from microbuild.microbuild import task,ignore,build

@task()
def clean():
    """Clean build directory."""
    print "Cleaning build directory..."

@task(clean)
def html():
    """Generate HTML."""
    print "Generating HTML..."

@ignore
@task(clean)
def images():
    """Prepare images."""
    print "Preparing images..."

@task(html,images)
def android():
    """Package Android app."""
    print "Packaging android app..."

if __name__ == "__main__":
    build(sys.modules[__name__],sys.argv[1:])

The command line interface and help is automatically generated. Task descriptions are extracted from function docstrings.

$ ./example.py -h
usage: example.py [-h] task

positional arguments:
  task        perform specified task and all it's dependancies

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit

tasks:
  android     Package Android app.
  clean       Clean build directory.
  html        Generate HTML.
  images      Prepare images.

Dependancies between tasks are taken care of too.

$ ./example.py android
[ example.py - Starting task "clean" ]
Cleaning build directory...
[ example.py - Completed task "clean" ]
[ example.py - Starting task "html" ]
Generating HTML...
[ example.py - Completed task "html" ]
[ example.py - Ignoring task "images" ]
[ example.py - Starting task "android" ]
Packaging android app...
[ example.py - Completed task "android" ]

Contributing

microbuild is hosted at https://github.com/CalumJEadie/microbuild and contributions are very welcome.

epydoc is used for documentation generation and unittest for tests.

Run build.py apidoc to generate documentation and build.py test to run all unit tests.

License

microbuild is licensed under a MIT license. See LICENSE.txt.