Target("phony:clean").evictCache exec {
AntDelete(dir = Path("target"))
}
Target("phony:compile").cacheable dependsOn compileCp ~ "scan:src/main/scala" exec {
// compile code ...omitted for brevity
}23 February 2013 by Tobias Roeser
The development of SBuild 0.4 is almost finished. SBuild 0.4.0 will provide a lot of new features. In this and some following post, I will dig a bit deeper into some of them.
This todays post is about the new caching mechanism for phony targets and the new "scan" target scheme to collect files.
SBuild already tries to reach a requested goal as fast as possible, but, of course, without sacrifying the correctness of the result. Targets that don’t need to be executed will be skipped. For file targets this is relatively easy, as the decission if a file target needs to be executed can be based on existence, and if, on the last modified attribute of the target file. Only if the file is missing or older than at least one dependency, it will be rebuild.
Phony targets produce by-definition no single target file. So, without further knowledge about the details of that target definition, SBuild is not able to skip the execution of phony targets, without risking the correctness of the build result.
But, as you already might have guessed, you can provide SBuild such information, so that it will be able to detect unnecessary executions of phony targets and thus will skip them.
You can set the new cacheable property of a phony target, which will tell SBuild, that this target will only depend on the declared dependencies and the buildfile itselves.
Through the cacheable flag, you tell SBuild, that if all dependencies of that target and the aggregated last modified time stamp of them are identical to those of a previous execution, then that target might be skipped.
Whenever at least one dependency of that target changes, or an attached file (this is another new feature I will write about in a future post) or when the build file or any of its dependencies have changed, the cached state is dropped and the target will be executed.
The most typical target you want to be cached is the "compile" target.
Of course, with cacheable target you also need some manual way to drop caches and force re-execution of all cached targets. To flag a target which should drop all cached states, you can set the evictCache property of that target. This target is most typically the "clean" target.
Here is an example:
Target("phony:clean").evictCache exec {
AntDelete(dir = Path("target"))
}
Target("phony:compile").cacheable dependsOn compileCp ~ "scan:src/main/scala" exec {
// compile code ...omitted for brevity
}The example above shows a minimal but already complete example for a cached phony target.
As said above, to be correct when evaluating up-to-dateness, it is essential, that you declare all dependencies, which would influence the outcome of that target.
Because of that, the "compile" target above declares beside the compile classpath (compileCp) also all source files (in this example all files under the src/main/scala directory) as dependencies.
To collect files you dont know beforehand, you can use the new "scan" target scheme (ScanSchemeHandler), which will scan a given directory for files matching a given pattern.
If no pattern is specified, all files will be attached and will be available throw the TargetContext of the target, that declared the dependency.
The following example shows the use of the scan target with a regex filter.
Target("phony:process-files") dependsOn "scan:src/main/resources;regex=.*\.conf" exec { ctx: TargetContext =>
ctx.fileTargets.map { file =>
// process file
}
}If you have many dependencies and need to selectively catch the scanned files, you can use the TargetRef.files method, like in this example.
val confFiles = "scan:src/main/resources;regex=.*\.conf"
Target("phony:process-files") dependsOn otherDependency ~ confFiles exec {
confFiles.files.map { file =>
// process each .conf file found in src/main/resources
}
// do something with the other dependencies
// otherDependencies.files.map { file => ... }
}Hope, you find this post useful.
Regards,
Tobias Roeser