Introduction
=====================================

What is BsBuilder?
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BsBuilder is an automated build system which main purpose is deploying PHP applications
with easy and in a consistent manner. It could be of course be used to build anything else
but currently it's main purpose is to 'build' PHP applications.

BsBuilder not based or derived from any tool in particular but it takes ideas from all over the
place: phing, ant, maven, gnumake, qmake (QT), and so on and so on. So thanks to all of those
great tools.


A little bit of history repeating
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Here at BinarySputnik we upload site updates **many** times a week (even many times a day) thus making
the task of creating the tar files used for uploading a really dull, repetitive task.

Ever worse, we *made mistakes* while doing this, *"Forgot such or such file"*, *"Overwrote config file"*, and so on.
This had to stop!


What do you mean by building PHP apps?
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Ok, your mama may have told you that php apps are not build, that for the most of if, she is right.
The thing is that you still need to update production servers, track version, upload big files (or
small ones), etc. 

We call the process of creating the "uploadable" files *build* and the files themselves
*packages*.


What's next?
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You can start looking around the code to figure out how BsBuilder works or you can go on and read: :doc:`getting_started`

What the future holds
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In future versions we plan to add:
   #. Better error handling
   #. More command line options
   #. Better native support of the ``bsbuild`` executable
   #. More tasks
   #. Even more tasks
   #. And a full automated distribution and deployment system

Stay tuned!