Introduction

Fabricate is a Lua-configured build system that produces Ninja build files. The fabricate CLI evaluates your fab.lua configuration, downloads declared git dependencies, records build graph information, and writes an output/build.ninja file (and optionally a compile_commands.json). After fabricate setup runs you invoke Ninja to actually build your project.

This guide documents how to use Fabricate: the CLI options, how to structure a fab.lua, and the helper functions and object types that Fabricate makes available to Lua. Development internals, contributing guidelines, and other non-user topics are intentionally omitted.

Getting Started

1. Install the fabricate binary (Cargo cargo install fabricate2 if you are building from source, or copy the compiled binary into your $PATH).
2. Create a working directory that contains a fab.lua configuration file. All paths referenced by the configuration are interpreted relative to this directory.
3. Run fabricate setup to generate the build directory. This will create the Ninja build file, compile commands, a fabricate cache file, ...
4. Build either with Ninja directly or using Fabricates wrapper. The default build directory is build.
   4.1. with Ninja: ninja -C <build dir>.
   4.2. with Fabricate: fabricate --build-dir <build dir>.
5. Finally install artifacts with fabricate install.