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Valder the Vala code welder is intended to be a general purpose build tool dedicated for Vala language based projects. We try to keep Valder as simple and intuitive as possible mantaining it's elastic and quite powerful design.
Valder is loosely inspired by Maven build tool for Java using only it's general idea of plugins based architecture.
Having in mind further extensions and code readibility Valder introduces a common structure holding all data necessary to build an application with some gap left for custom extensions.
This structure, called later Recipe, consists of several essential elements describing whole build project:
In usual situations recipe structure is used internally by Valder and Valder plugins to fill project information in as much as possible automatic manner. Just before running build phase Valder scans current working directory for a configuration file.
Whole recipe is deserialized from recipe file - recipe.bob. This is just a simple JSON file with very meaningful structure.
Every project that is using Valder as a build tool has to share the same meaningful structure with source code located under appropriate folders:
As stated earlier Valder design is created around a Plugin based approach, where each plugin, called later Plugin, is responsible for performing a dedicated action on a set of project source code files. Here you can find a list of plugins shipped with Valder distribution package:
First plugin used to initialize contents of a new Valder project. It's intented to be used on empty project directory by creating it's default structure. Plugin honors all directories specified in "Valder project structure". Plugin is totally safe and wont harm your current filesystem hierarchy.
This particular plugin is shipped with mechanism for creating an empty project recipe file with some default entries filled in. One can easily generate new recipe with some basic data like project name, version, base PKG Glib dependencies and so on.
Plugin aims to traverse recursively through project directory structure and collect a list of Vala source code files. Then the list is strored in project properties available for other plugins.
It's basically a refactored ValaCompiler source code tuned a little bit to fit Valder architecture. It uses Vala source code files found by collect-sources plugin and goes through Vala compiler procedure (generating C code, GIR bindings, VAPI files, etc). Usualy you will use this plugin together with collect-sources.
Valder source code package comes together with several shell scripts used to build Valder library and runtime binaries. Because Valder package does not contain compiled binaries you have to do it on your own but only once, Valder is capable of building it's source code with ... itself ;)
First we need to generate Valder library file, go and execute following shell script:
If everything goes fine you will see a libvalder.so library file under target/lib folder. After library has been successfuly generated you can now proceed the similar operation with runtime binary, just run the command:
This one will result with a new runtime binary file located under target/valder
When you are done with the base binaries you can go and build some plugins shipped with Valder package. You can find a number of plugins directories listed in main Valder directory:
Each directory consists of a set of plugin source files in a directory structure compatible with Valder. To compile a plugin source code run a dedicated script located in each plugin directory:
Repeat the same script invocation for all plugins you are going to use and after library file for each of plugin is generated you can now copy them over to Valder plugins directory by using provided shell script: