abuild 0.1.0.post3

A simple, language agnostic build tool

Welcome to abuild

When I was looking for a build tool for a (fairly simple) monorepo, I noticed that although there are many great ones, they all require considerable setup or they only work with one particular language. I was rather looking for a basic build tool that needs almost no setup and can handle a handful services in one repository with some frontend, some backend and maybe a bit of machine learning code.

My goals for this project are

• Setting up abuild for a simple setup should be (almost) no effort.
• Code that hasn't changed shouldn't be re-build (that's kind of the point of a build tool).
• If I write a service in a different language, I should be able to use the same build tool.

To do this, abuild acts as a glue between existing language specific tools—in that sense calling it a "build tool" might almost be promising too much. It's rather a build tool manager for monorepos.

Getting started

You can install abuild from pypi with pip install abuild.

This example looks at a very simple monorepo with a python backend that gets build into a docker container and a javascript frontend that gets build with npm run build. There is also a tools directory that shouldn't be build: $ tree . |-- backend | |-- Dockerfile | -- tox.ini |-- frontend | -- package.json `-- tools

3 directories, 3 files

To set up abuild in a new monorepo, you can run

$ abuild parse > abuild.yaml $ cat abuild.yaml components:

• path: backend steps:
  • cmd: tox
  • cmd: docker buildx build .
• path: frontend steps:
  • cmd: npm run test
  • cmd: npm run build

As you can see, abuild understood the basics of the repository and created the skeleton of a config file. Feel free to update the config file by hand. For example, you could add names for the steps by setting components.[].steps.[].name. You could also delete (or add) steps to fit your needs.

To build your services with abuild, you simply run abuild build in your project root. abuild maintains a state file .abuild_state.json that tracks your build status. Currently, the state is not synchronized between machines (which can be a bit of a hindrance of CI). However, you can commit the .abuild_state.json to your revision control system.