Getting Started

XML

BsBuilder can only do what you tell it to, and to do that you have to speak XML.

The basic XML structure of you project’s build file should include:

• One root element called project
• Any number of elements elements such as property
• At least one target element with any number of task sub elements

A Very Simple Example

We are going to build a project called, yes you know it, hello_world.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<project name='hello_world' default='all'>

   <target name='all'>
      <tasks>
            <mkdir dirname='./build/all' />

            <copy source='.' dest='./build/all'>

            </copy>

            <package strategy='tar_bz2' name='hellod_workd.tar.bz2' dest='./build/all'  />

            <echo text='Package save as: ./build/all/hellod_workd.tar.bz2' />
      </tasks>
   </target>

   <target name='clean'>
      <tasks>
            <delete dirname='./build' />
      </tasks>
   </target>
</project>

First we define the project and it’s name. And the most important part there is to define a default target which allows us to run bsbuild without arguments.

Then for this example we define two targets: default and clean.

The default target it a simple copy all and compress build. We add the copy task and instruct it to copy everything from the current directory to the build directory. We can ignore some files and patterns but we’ll talk about that in a minute.

Then we have the package task which in this case, compresses everything from the dest folder into a file named hellod_workd.tar.bz2.

Run BsBuilder

To run bs builder to build the example project we just run: bsbuild without arguments from the folder where we have the build.conf.xml file.