TDBuilder: A build system using Deno

Using TDBuilder you can specify rules for building files or directories, or running other tasks.

Similar to Make, non-phony targets will be compared with their prerequisites based on mtime to determine if they need to be rebuilt.

Some differences from Make:

• Deno instead of $SHELL, so you don’t need to worry so much about the quirks of the target platform.
  • Also, it won’t be tripped up by filenames that contain spaces.
• When comparing modification times, directories are considered as new as the newest contained file, so you don’t need silly things like some_target: $(shell find some_source_directory)

It is based on https://github.com/TOGoS/NodeBuildUtil.

TDBuilder does not do anything by itself, but can be used by a script, which you might call make.ts, which might look something like this:

import Builder from 'https://deno.land/x/tdbuilder@0.5.0/Builder.ts';

const builder = new Builder({
    rules: {
        "hello-world.txt": {
            description: "An example text file",
            invoke(ctx:BuildContext) {
                Deno.writeTextFile(ctx.targetName, "Hello, world!\n");
                return Promise.resolve();
            }
        },
        // A rule to build foobar.txt is not specified,
        // so it must be present already, e.g. committed to the project repo.
        "concatenation.txt": {
            description: "An example of a rule with prerequisites",
            prereqs: ["hello-world.txt", "foobar.txt"],
            async invoke(ctx:BuildContext) {
                const allContent = await Promise.all(ctx.prereqNames.map(file => Deno.readTextFile(file)))
                return Deno.writeTextFile(ctx.targetName, allContent.join(""));
            }
        },
        "test": {
            description: "Run all unit tests!",
            cmd: [Deno.execPath(),"test", "--allow-read=src", "src/test/deno"]
        }
    },
    // If the user just runs `deno run --allow-all make.ts`, we'll build these targets:
    defaultTargetNames: ["concatenation.txt","test"]
});
Deno.exit(await builder.processCommandLine(Deno.args));

There is currently (as of 0.5.0) no way to indicate a build rule that builds multiple targets. As a workaround, define one of the targets (preferrably a non-phony one) and list it as a prerequisite for the others.

Rules are run in parallel as much as possible. If you wish to prevent some build rules from running simultaneously, you can use a mutex (implementation of which is for now left to you), either in invoke() or added by the buildFunctionTransformer.

Normally you shouldn’t need to reference ctx.builder, but you can if you need to dynamically request to build a prerequisite.

Targets are built at most once per Builder instance.

Run your script with -v to generate some info on the console about targets being built.