Rant – Ruby’s ant

Rant is a flexible build tool written entirely in Ruby.

The equivalent to a Makefile for make is the Rantfile. An Rantfile is actually a valid Ruby script that is read in by the rant command.

Rant currently features:

Rantfiles are written in Ruby.
Defining custom tasks
Automated packaging, testing and RDoc generation for Ruby applications and libraries.
The rant-import command creates a monolithic rant script, so you don’t depend on an rant installation anymore.
Creating gzipped tar and zip archives – without installing additional software.
Optional recognition of file changes based on MD5 checksums instead of file modification times.
Tasks with command change recognition.
Dependency checking for C/C++ source files.

As programmers usually want to see code, here is a short and very basic example of rant usage:

A file called Rantfile contains the code:

file "backup/data" => "data" do |t|

sys.cp t.source, t.name

end

Running rant in the directory of this file:

% rant
cp data backup/data

will ensure that the “data” file in the “backup” directory is up to date.

This document was written for version 0.5.6 of Rant. Most things described here will work for older/newer versions of Rant, but look at the README file in the Rant distribution you’ve installed for exact documentation of your Rant version.

Support

The newest version of this document can be found at make.rubyforge.org.

For further information, feature requests, bugreports or comments join the mailing list make-cafe or visit the RubyForge site for Rant.

Also feel free to contact the author directly by sending an email to [email protected].

Roadmap

Installing Rant: read INSTALL
License: read the section Copying in this document
Invoking rant: read doc/rant.rdoc
Writing an Rantfile: read doc/rantfile.rdoc
Automation for your Ruby library/application: read doc/rubyproject.rdoc
Independent from Rant? The rant-import command: read doc/rant-import.rdoc
Advanced Rantfiles: read doc/advanced.rdoc
Packaging (creating zip/tgz archives): read doc/package.rdoc
Using MD5 checksums instead of file modification times: read doc/md5.rdoc
Compiling C/C++: read doc/c.rdoc
Buildfiles in subdirectories: read doc/subdirs.rdoc
Tasks with command change recognition: read doc/command.rdoc
Using the Configure plugin: read doc/configure.rdoc deprecated
Compiling C#: read doc/csharp.rdoc
Common file system operations: read doc/sys.rdoc
Upgrading: read the NEWS for new features, not backwards compatible changes and other issues.
Using Rant libraries: read doc/rubylib.rdoc

Copying

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA

The file COPYING in the Rant package contains a copy of the LGPL. Of course your Rantfiles don’t need to be licenced under the terms of the LGPL.

The file lib/rant/archive/rubyzip.rb and the files in the lib/rant/archive/rubyzip directory were written by Thomas Sondergaard. They are distributed under the same license as ruby. See www.ruby-lang.org/en/LICENSE.txt.

Other info

Rant was started in February 2005. It has been written and is maintained by Stefan Lang ([email protected]).

Credits

Rant has taken the basic syntax of a task and some other concepts from Rake. So thanks to Jim Weirich, the author of Rake.

Rant comes with parts of archive-tar-minitar to create (gzipped) tar archives on platforms where no tar command is available. archive-tar-minitar is developed by Mauricio Julio Fernandez Pradier and Austin Ziegler.

Rant comes with parts of rubyzip to create zip archives on platforms where no zip command is available. rubyzip is developed by Thomas Sondergaard.

Goals of Rant

Most important is to be a very flexible build tool. This currently means that you can run/use Rant in many different ways. E.g. you can invoke it the conventional way like make, define tasks and run Rant from irb (the interactive Ruby shell), create an independent script with rant-import, or simply use Rant as a library to automate tasks for your application.
Extensible: currently through plugins and generators. (Think of the plugin and import functions.)
Portability: see Platforms below for details
Well scaling: Rant should work acceptable for bigger projects (from a performance POV and for the writer of the Rantfiles).

Platforms

Rant was tested on:

System		Ruby version
=======================================================
Linux		1.8.0
                    1.8.1
                    1.8.2

1.8.3 1.8.4 1.9

MacOS X		1.8.2
Windows XP		1.8.2 (OneClick Installer)
Windows XP		1.8.4 (OneClick Installer)
Windows 2000	1.8.2 (OneClick Installer)

It should run on most platforms where Ruby runs, but you never know…

If you encounter problems with Rant on any platform (with Ruby 1.8.0 or higher) please write a bugreport!

Why did you write another build tool?

Because I wasn’t satisfied by any other build tool. Before I started Rant, I had to write a program in C#. The program had to run under Windows, but I wanted to develop under Linux. Also I decided to write the documentation in Docbook.

So there where quite a few problems arising:

I had to compile with cscc on Linux.
compile with csc on Windows.
automate PDF and HTML generation from Docbook

Nant would have been ok to compile the C# sources. But it isn’t suited for more general tasks as clueing togheter other programs (needed for Docbook processing).

Then I tried to use Rake and it was the other way round. I liked the basic concept and syntax of Rake and of course I could have written code for Rake (e.g. with a so called Tasklib) to support portable C# compilation. But it was a bit quirky and because I like to work with Ruby, I decided to write my own build tool.