package dune

  1. Overview
  2. Docs
Fast, portable and opinionated build system

Install

Dune Dependency

Authors

Maintainers

Sources

dune-build-info-1.11.3.tbz
sha256=c83a63e7e8245611b0e11d6adea07c6484dc1b4efffacb176315cd6674d4bbd2
sha512=2c1532b91d223e6ea0628c5f5174792c1bb4113a464f6d8b878b3c58be1136beb84ba2d9883a330fa20e550367588aa923ba06ffb9b615a098a21374a9377e81

README.md.html

Dune - A composable build system

Dune 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 dune 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.

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

The example directory contains examples of projects using dune.

Overview

Dune reads project metadata from dune 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, handle installation, etc...

Dune itself is fast, has very low overhead and supports parallel builds on all platforms. It has no system dependencies: all you need to build dune and packages using dune 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 dune and packages using dune.

Strengths

Composable

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

This make simultaneous development on multiple packages trivial.

Gracefully handles multi-package repositories

Dune knows how to handle repositories containing several packages. When building via 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:

$ dune build --only-packages <package-name> @install

Building against several configurations at once

Dune 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 test them all at once without hassle.

In particular, this makes it easy to handle cross-compilation.

This feature requires opam.

Requirements

Dune requires OCaml version 4.02.3 or greater.

Installation

The recommended way to install dune is via the opam package manager:

$ opam install dune

You can also build it manually with:

$ make release
$ make install

Running simply make will build dune using the development settings.

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

$ ocaml bootstrap.ml
$ ./boot.exe
$ ./_boot/default/bin/main_dune.exe install dune

Support

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

Migration from jbuilder

Dune was formerly known as jbuilder. Migration from jbuilder to dune is described in the manual.

Status

Dune is now fairly stable and is used by the majority of packages on opam. Note that dune retains backward compatibility with Jbuilder, and in particular existing Jbuilder projects will continue to be buildable with dune.

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