merlke - A native Erlang build tool

Merlke is a command line build tool that aims to automate common Erlang build tasks. It's a dependency build language in the vein of Make but is written in Erlang to provide nicer hooks into built-in Erlang modules.

Installation

Run:

make

Then put scripts/merlke in your PATH

I also highly recommend installing Markdown if you want to be able to translate README.md files into EDoc overviews.

Usage

Assuming you follow the standard Erlang file conventions, you can just run:

merlke task1 [task2 [task3 [...]]]

Standard directory structure

doc/      -> generated edocs directory   (edoc_dir/0)
ebin/     -> .beam directory             (ebin_dir/0)
src/      -> module source directory     (src_dir/0)
src/*.erl -> module source files         (modules/0)
*.app     -> application files
*.xrl     -> leex files
*.yrl     -> yecc files 

To override a directory convention, implement the callback in parenthesis in a module called merlkefile.erl in your project's base directory.

Tasks

• clean
• compile
• generate
• edoc
• dialyzer (not yet implemented)
• test
• start
• dist (not yet implemented)

Task dependencies

start   -> test
test    -> compile
compile -> generate
dist    -> test, edoc

Sample merlkefile.erl

Merlke will work fine without a merlkefile, but if you want to override the standard files, you can do so by export certain callbacks:

-module(merlkefile).
-export([src_dir/0, ebin_dir/0, edoc_dir/0, modules/0]).

src_dir() -> "src".
ebin_dir() -> "ebin".
edoc_dir() -> "doc".
modules() -> 
    {ok, Filenames} = file:list_dir(src_dir()),
    Filenames.