Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. https://ninja-build.org/
See the manual or doc/manual.asciidoc
included in the distribution for background and more details.
Binaries for Linux, Mac and Windows are available on GitHub. Run ./ninja -h
for Ninja help.
Installation is not necessary because the only required file is the resulting ninja binary. However, to enable features like Bash completion and Emacs and Vim editing modes, some files in misc/ must be copied to appropriate locations.
If you're interested in making changes to Ninja, read CONTRIBUTING.md first.
You can either build Ninja via the custom generator script written in Python or via CMake. For more details see the wiki.
./configure.py --bootstrap
This will generate the ninja
binary and a build.ninja
file you can now use to build Ninja with itself.
If you have a GoogleTest source directory, you can build the tests by passing its path with --gtest-source-dir=PATH
option, or the GTEST_SOURCE_DIR
environment variable, e.g.:
./configure.py --bootstrap --gtest-source-dir=/path/to/googletest ./ninja all # build ninja_test and other auxiliary binaries ./ninja_test` # run the unit-test suite.
Use the CMake build below if you want to use a preinstalled binary version of the library.
cmake -Bbuild-cmake cmake --build build-cmake
The ninja
binary will now be inside the build-cmake
directory (you can choose any other name you like).
To run the unit tests:
./build-cmake/ninja_test
You must have asciidoc
and xsltproc
in your PATH, then do:
./configure.py ninja manual doc/manual.pdf
Which will generate doc/manual.html
.
To generate the PDF version of the manual, you must have dblatext
in your PATH then do:
./configure.py # only if you didn't do it previously. ninja doc/manual.pdf
Which will generate doc/manual.pdf
.
If you have doxygen
installed, you can build documentation extracted from C++ declarations and comments to help you navigate the code. Note that Ninja is a standalone executable, not a library, so there is no public API, all details exposed here are internal.
./configure.py # if needed ninja doxygen
Then open doc/doxygen/html/index.html
in a browser to look at it.