Ningen: a simple Ninja build generator

Ningen is a work-in-progress build generator for Ninja.

With Ningen, you define your Ninja build targets and rules using a simple TypeScript API, and it generates a build.ninja file for you. The build files are just regular TypeScript files, run with Deno, so you’re free to extend them and make them as complex and powerful as you need to.

Released at https://deno.land/x/ningen. Latest version is https://deno.land/x/ningen@v0.0.3/mod.ts

Installation

Install Deno: https://deno.land
Install Ninja: https://ninja-build.org
There’s no need to download or install Ningen yourself, Deno will do that for you.

Getting started

TODO: Update these instructions when the new API works.

(Also take a look at the examples folder.)

Define a BUILD.ts file at the root of your repo. This file will define the build rules for your entire project. Make it executable:
```
chmod +x BUILD.ts
```
Add this shebang line so that executing BUILD.ts will run it with Deno:
```
#!/usr/bin/env -S deno run --allow-read --allow-write --unstable
```
Import the root function from Ningen, and add the following skeleton:
```
import { init } from "https://deno.land/x/ningen@v0.0.3/mod.ts";

// import.meta.url is a necessary hack in order to use relative file paths.
const ng = init(import.meta.url);

// Rules and targets go here.

// Generate the build.ninja file.
ng.generate();
});
```
The init function will return a Ningen instance (conventionally called ng, short for “ningen”). That class lets you define Ninja rules and targets. The Ningen API for those looks very similar to the Ninja syntax.

Be sure to call the generate method at the very end to generate the build.ninja file.
Define Ninja rules using the rule method. e.g. this rule invokes a shell script called append.sh:
```
const appendRule = ng.rule({
  name: "append",
  command: "$binary $in $out",
  binary: ng.file("append.sh"),
});
```
The implicit argument does not have an equivalent in Ninja. It lets you list files in the rule itself that will be added as implicit inputs to any targets that use the rule. e.g. in the example above, if the append.sh script is modified, everything that uses the append rule will be rebuilt.

Define Ninja build targets using the build method:

ng.build({
  rule: appendRule,
  inputs: ng.files("file.txt"),
  outputs: ng.files("file.txt.out"),
});

You can define helper functions too, which is helpful when you have lots of files:

function append(src) {
  ng.build({
    rule: appendRule,
    inputs: [src],
    outputs: [src + ".out"],
  });
}

append("file1.txt");
append("file2.txt");
append("file3.txt");

The glob method lets you easily operate over many files:

ng.glob("*.txt").forEach((src) => append(src));

You can also use globs directly in calls to build:

ng.build({
  rule: appendRule,
  inputs: ng.glob("*.txt"),
  outputs: ["everything.out"],
});

Special vars

There are some special vars you can use in your build commands. There are all the usual ninja ones, here are some of note:

$in is the list of input sources, e.g. command = "gcc $in"
$out is the list of output sources, e.g. command = "cat $in > $out"

In addition, there are some extra ones defined for ningen:

$binary is the relative path of the file from the binary rule property, e.g. command = "$binary --flag"
$dir is the directory of the current BUILD.ts file, e.g. command = "cd $dir && cargo build"

Developer notes

Run deno test to run the unit tests.

Run ./test.sh to run the unit tests, and test the example folders.

See [RELEASING.md] for instructions on deploying a new release.