.. -*- mode: rst; encoding: utf-8 -*-

=============
Build Recipes
=============

A build recipe tells a build slave how a project is to be built. It consists of
multiple build steps, each defining a command to execute, and where artifacts
can be found after that command has successfully completed.

Build recipes are intended to supplement existing project build files (such as
Makefiles), not to replace them. In general, a recipe will be much simpler than
the build file itself, because it doesn't deal with all the details of the
build. It just automates the execution of the build and lets the build slave
locate any artifacts and metrics data generated in the course of the build.

A recipe can and should split the build into multiple separate steps so that the
build slave can provide better status reporting to the build master while the
build is still in progress. This is important for builds that might take long to
execute. In addition, build steps help organize the build results for a more
structured presentation.

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File Format
===========

Build recipes are stored internally in an XML-based format. Recipe documents
have a single ``<build>`` root element with one or more ``<step>`` child
elements. The steps are executed in the order they appear in the recipe.

A ``<step>`` element will consist of any number of commands and reports. Most of
these elements are declared in XML namespaces, where the namespace URI defines
a collection of related commands.

.. code-block:: xml

  <build xmlns:python="http://bitten.cmlenz.net/tools/python">
  
    <step id="build" description="Compile to byte code">
      <python:distutils command="build"/>
    </step>
  
    <step id="test" description="Run unit tests">
      <python:distutils command="unittest"/>
      <python:unittest file="build/test-results.xml"/>
      <python:trace summary="build/test-coverage.txt" 
          coverdir="build/coverage" include="trac*" exclude="*.tests.*"/>
    </step>
  
  </build>

See `Build Recipe Commands`_ for a comprehensive reference of the commands
available by default.

.. _`build recipe commands`: commands.html