Epine

Epine is a powerful Makefile generator using the Lua programming language for its configuration.

Goals

• Generating a single Makefile
• Scaling up as well as scaling down
• Allowing anyone to share their Epine modules and helper libraries

Non-goals

• Replacing make
• Replacing a package manager

Installation

Install the latest release of Epine with Cargo:

cargo install epine

If you don't have Cargo/Rust installed, you can get it on rustup.rs.

Hello, Epine!

Go in the folder of your choice, where you want your Makefile to be generated.

mkdir hello-epine
cd hello-epine

In this new folder, create a new file named Epine.lua:

return {
    action "hello" {
        echo("hello!");
    };
}

To (re)generate the Makefile, simply run epine, without any argument.

epine

Epine will run the Lua code contained in the Epine.lua file and generate a Makefile according to what this file returns to it.

hello:
    @echo hello!
.PHONY: hello

Using remote modules

The way the generated Makefile is described is very close to what ends up being generated. If it was just that, Epine would just be a very annoying way to write your Makefiles... in Lua.

This is why Epine has the ability to download and load Lua modules from GitHub repositories. This makes it really easy to reuse and share helper functions and libraries. For now, only GitHub is supported, but I would love to see Epine support many more sources in the future; contributions are welcome!

Here's an example showing how simple the generation of a Makefile can become:

-- the `tek` module, which was made for students at Epitech, takes care of
-- generating many rules automatically, like "all", "clean", "fclean", etc...
-- it also generates the proper rules to build and run unit tests!
local tek = require "@nasso/epine-tek/v0.1.0-alpha"

-- project metadata (its name, and the targets built by the "all" target)
tek:project "libmy" {"libmy.a", "hello"}

-- a C static library!
tek:static "libmy.a" {
    language = "C";
}

-- a C binary using the library!
tek:binary "hello" {
    language = "C";
    prerequisites = {"libmy.a"};
    srcs = {"main.c"};
    libs = {"my"};
}

-- return the Makefile description to Epine for generation
return tek:make()

This simple script, which is only 12 lines of code, generates a clean, human-readable, and fully functional Makefile! Of course, this is only a mere example of what Epine is capable of.

Because it's all Lua anyway, you can imagine any sort of API to describe your project, and you can share it with anyone!

Status

Epine is still a very young project. The main reason I built it was because I didn't want to copy-paste my Makefiles between the different school projects I had to build during my first years as an Epitech student.

License

Epine is licensed under the terms of both the MIT license and the Apache License (Version 2.0), at your choice.

See LICENSE-MIT and LICENSE-APACHE-2.0 files for the full texts.