7. Build

Overview

Fantom comes bundled with its own standard build engine to promote consistency and make sharing code easy. Build scripts are normal Fantom scripts which subclass from BuildScript. Characteristics of build scripts:

BuildScript base class handles common functions like command line parsing, environment setup, and logging
Subclasses define targets which are things the build script can do such as "compile", "clean", or "test"
Targets are implemented as normal Fantom methods which can execute any procedural code needed using the APIs installed
The build pod provides libraries of tasks which are designed to provide common chunks of functionality which can be composed to define targets
The build pod provides a library of predefined BuildScript classes to handle common scripts - one you will use all the time is BuildPod used to build Fantom pods.

The build toolkit is designed to provide a consistent way to organize build scripts - it doesn't provide a comprehensive library of everything you might need to perform a build. But by predefining common scripts such as BuildPod it reduces most scripts down to purely declarative information. When you do need the power of custom code, you can implement it cleanly as normal Fantom code.

Example

Let's create a build script called "buildtest.fan":

using build

class Build : BuildScript
{
  @Target { help = "Compile everything" }
  Void compile() { log.info("Compile away!") }

  @Target { help = "Clean it all up" }
  Void clean() { log.info("Clean away!") }
}

The script above defines two targets: compile and clean. The targets are annotated with the @Target facet. Set the help field to a short summary. To print the usage of this script use "-?":

C:\dev\fan\src>buildtest -?
usage:
  build [options] <target>*
options:
  -? -help       Print usage summary
  -v             Verbose debug logging
  -dumpEnv       Debug dump of script env
targets:
  compile*       Compile everything
  clean          Clean it all up

Note that the "compile" target is marked with an asterisk indicating it is the default target because it is the first one declared. If we invoke the script with no arguments the "compile" target is executed:

C:\dev\fan\src>buildtest
Compile away!
BUILD SUCCESS [3ms]!

Or we can pass one or more targets as arguments:

C:\dev\fan\src>buildtest clean
Clean away!
BUILD SUCCESS [2ms]!

C:\dev\fan\src>buildtest clean compile
Clean away!
Compile away!
BUILD SUCCESS [2ms]!

Note: see Setup to configure your environment to run scripts using just the script filename.

BuildScript

The BuildScript is the base class for all build scripts. It provides many useful slots you will find handy:

log: standardized logging
scriptFile: the file of the script itself
scriptDir: the directory containing the script
devHomeDir: home directory of your development Fantom environment

Lifecycle

A build script lifecycle is composed of these steps:

Base class constructor is run and will immediately setup the environment variables such as log and scriptFile.
Your subclass constructor is run, which is where you can configure your own scripts fields.
The targets callback is invoked to get the list of targets - most often you will let the default implementation build this list by searching for methods which implement the @Target facet.
Command line parsed to find all the specified targets, if no targets specified then we use the first target from the targets method..
Each target method is invoked in the order specified
If an exception is raised, the script fails and returns -1, otherwise 0 is returned.

Problems during the script should be reported via the BuildScript.log. If an error is encountered which should terminate the script, then throw a FatalBuildErr via this pattern:

throw fatal("I just can't go on!")

BuildPod

BuildPod is the base class for build scripts which build a Fantom pod. The BuildPod script defines a bunch of fields to be filled in. Plus it predefines several targets ready to use:

compile: recompiles Fantom code into a pod file along with all associated natives (JavaScript, Java, .NET)
clean: deletes all the intermediate and derived target files
test: runs all tests declared by the pod
full: clean, compile, test

By convention pod source directories are organized as follows:

foo/
  build.fan
  fan/
    ClassAlpha.fan
    ClassBeta.fan
  java/
    ClassAlphaPeer.java
  js/
    ClassAlphaPeer.js
  dotnet/
    ClassAlphaPeer.cs
  test/
    TestClassAlpha.fan
    TestClassBeta.fan
  res/
    icon.png
    resource-file.txt

If you don't have tests or native code, then those directories aren't included. The build script for our directory structure above would look like:

// build.fan
using build
class Build : BuildPod
{
  new make()
  {
    podName    = "foo"
    summary    = "Description of foo pod.  Foo is good."
    depends    = ["sys 1.0+", "bar 1.1+"]
    srcDirs    = [`fan/`, `test/`]
    javaDirs   = [`java/`]
    jsDirs     = [`js/`]
    dotnetDirs = [`dotnet/`]
    resDirs    = [`res/`]
  }
}

Note that all the directories are specified as Uris relative to the script directory. If you don't have native code, you can omit the javaDirs, dotnetDirs, and jsDirs settings. If you don't have resource files you can omit resDirs. See HelloWorld for a simpler example.

Typically the pod's version is set by the build script's version field. By default this is set to the config property buildVersion configured in "etc/build/config.props".

Init Tool

Fantom version 1.0.72 and after includes an "init" tool to simplify creating new projects:

$ fan build init hello
Created new env 'hello/'
Created new pod 'src/hello/'
INIT SUCCESS!

Which generates the following directory:

hello
├── etc
├── fan.props
├── lib
└── src
    ├── build.fan
    └── hello
        ├── build.fan
        ├── fan
        └── test

A few things to note about this structure:

If the "hello" directory does not exist, the init tool assumes this is a new project and generates a "fan.props" file. This file indicates to the build and runtime tools this directory is a PathEnv. Now when you build pods they will be written to the local "lib/" directory and not pollute your global Fantom "lib" folder.
By convention Fantom projects are organized as <project-name>/src/<pod-name>. So the "hello" pod source will be contained under its own subdirectory.
The root src/build.fan is your top-level build script. This script subclasses BuildGroup. Whenever you add a new pod to your project, be sure to add it here, so you can build everything in on step.

If you need additional pods for your project, just rerun the init tool under your project directory:

~/hello$ fan build init next
Created new pod 'src/next/'
Remember to add 'next/build.fan' to 'src/build.fan'!
INIT SUCCESS!

Your project directory now looks like:

hello
├── etc
├── fan.props
├── lib
└── src
    ├── build.fan
    ├── hello
    │   ├── build.fan
    │   ├── fan
    │   └── test
    └── next
        ├── build.fan
        ├── fan
        └── test

Note that the init tool supports relative paths when generating new pod source trees:

$ fan build init backend/webserver
Created new pod 'src/backend/webserver/'
Remember to add 'backend/webserver/build.fan' to 'src/build.fan'!
INIT SUCCESS!

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