dune/README.md

Dune (Jbuilder) - A composable build system
===========================================

__Jbuilder has been renamed to Dune__. A full renaming of the documentation and
the tool will be done as part of the 1.0 release.

Jbuilder is a build system designed for OCaml/Reason projects only. It
focuses on providing the user with a consistent experience and takes
care of most of the low-level details of OCaml compilation. All you
have to do is provide a description of your project and Jbuilder will
do the rest.

The scheme it implements is inspired from the one used inside Jane
Street and adapted to the open source world. It has matured over a
long time and is used daily by hundreds of developers, which means
that it is highly tested and productive.

Jbuilder comes with a [manual][manual]. If you want to get started
without reading too much, you can look at the [quick start
guide][quick-start] or watch [this introduction video][video].

The [example][example] directory contains examples of projects using
jbuilder.

[![Travis status][travis-img]][travis] [![AppVeyor status][appveyor-img]][appveyor]

[manual]:         https://jbuilder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
[quick-start]:    https://jbuilder.readthedocs.io/en/latest/quick-start.html
[example]:        https://github.com/ocaml/dune/tree/master/example
[travis]:         https://travis-ci.org/ocaml/dune
[travis-img]:     https://travis-ci.org/ocaml/dune.svg?branch=master
[appveyor]:       https://ci.appveyor.com/project/diml/dune/branch/master
[appveyor-img]:   https://ci.appveyor.com/api/projects/status/rsxayce22e8f2jkp?svg=true
[merlin]:         https://github.com/ocaml/merlin
[opam]:           https://opam.ocaml.org
[jenga]:          https://github.com/janestreet/jenga
[issues]:         https://github.com/ocaml/dune/issues
[topkg-jbuilder]: https://github.com/diml/topkg-jbuilder
[video]:          https://youtu.be/BNZhmMAJarw

Overview
--------

Jbuilder reads project metadata from `jbuild` files, which are either
static files in a simple S-expression syntax or OCaml scripts. It uses
this information to setup build rules, generate configuration files
for development tools such as [merlin][merlin], handle installation,
etc...

Jbuilder itself is fast, has very low overhead and supports parallel
builds on all platforms. It has no system dependencies: all you need
to build jbuilder and packages using jbuilder is OCaml. You don't need
`make` or `bash` as long as the packages themselves don't use `bash`
explicitly.

Especially, one can install OCaml on Windows with a binary installer
and then use only the Windows Console to build Jbuilder and packages
using Jbuilder.

Strengths
---------

### Composable

Take n repositories that use Jbuilder, arrange them in any way on the
file system and the result is still a single repository that Jbuilder
knows how to build at once.

This make simultaneous development on multiple packages trivial.

### Gracefully handles multi-package repositories

Jbuilder knows how to handle repositories containing several
packages. When building via [opam][opam], it is able to correctly use
libraries that were previously installed even if they are already
present in the source tree.

The magic invocation is:

```sh
$ jbuilder build --only-packages <package-name> @install
```

### Building against several configurations at once

Jbuilder is able to build a given source code repository against
several configurations simultaneously. This helps maintaining packages
across several versions of OCaml as you can tests them all at once
without hassle.

This feature should make cross-compilation easy, see details in the
[roadmap](ROADMAP.md).

This feature requires [opam][opam].

### Jenga bridge

[Jenga][jenga] is another build system for OCaml that has more
advanced features such as polling or much better editor
integration. Jenga is more powerful and more complex and as a result
has many more dependencies.  It is planned to implement a small bridge
between the two so that a Jbuilder project can build with Jenga using
this bridge.

Requirements
------------

Jbuilder requires OCaml version 4.02.3 or greater.

installation
------------

The recommended way to install jbuilder is via the
[opam package manager][opam]:

```sh
$ opam install jbuilder
```

You can also build it manually with:

```sh
$ make release
$ make install
```

Note however that `make install` requires the `opam-installer`
tool. Running simply `make` will build jbuilder using the development
settings.

If you do not have `make`, you can do the following:

```sh
$ ocaml bootstrap.ml
$ ./boot.exe
$ ./_build/default/bin/main.exe install
```

Support
-------

If you have questions about jbuilder, you can send an email to
ocaml-core@googlegroups.com or [open a ticket on github][issues].


Migration from jbuilder
-----------------------

Migration from jbuilder to dune is described in the
[manual](http://dune.readthedocs.io/en/latest/migration.html).

Status
------

Dune is now fairly stable and is used by the majority of packages on
opam. The package is still in beta version as we are waiting for the
renaming from Jbuilder to Dune before releasing version 1.0.0. Note
that Dune will have backward compatiblity with Jbuilder, in particular
existing Jbuilder projects will continue to be buildable with
Dune. Additionally, Dune will be able to automatically convert a
Jbuilder project into a Dune project.