njinja

njinja is a general-purpose lightweight meta-build system for Ninja.

It is for people who:

• need the flexilibity of make(1) (e.g. wildcards) but want to migrate away from its unclean language

• need the lightweight and principled design of ninja(1) but need a equally lightweight (and principled) way to generate its build files

• have an unusual project structure that cannot be cleanly handled by other common meta-build systems for ninja, that are too special-purpose or focus on a particular programming language that isn't what your project actually uses.

Install via pip:

$ pip3 install -U njinja

Usage

1. Write your Ninja build file as a Jinja template, named (e.g.) build.ninja.j2. Within this template, you may refer to variables that contain build inputs that cannot be known (or are inconvenient to know) in advance.

2. Write a python build script, named (e.g.) build.py, that uses our njinja library to calculate these build inputs, populate the template with them, create a build.ninja file, and call ninja on this file all in one step.

See here for our basic example, that showcases a few different ways of calculating these build variables. Adapt this to whatever is suitable for your project.