Rebuild is a tool for building D software. It is based on the frontend to the
DMD D compiler.

Essentially, for any D source file given, rebuild finds all dependencies, and
compiles them all into the target. Compiling a D program with rebuild is, for
example:

rebuild foo/foo.d -offood

In this example, a program called fooD is compiled with the main source file
being foo/foo.d.


Rebuild can also compile libraries. The -lib flag to rebuild causes it to
generate a library instead of a binary:

Windows+DMD: rebuild -lib foo/foo.d -offoo.lib
Otherwise:   rebuild -lib foo/foo.d -oflibfoo.a


A useful flag when generating libraries is -explicit, which will cause it /not/
to include all the dependencies. For example, if foo/foo.d imports foo/bar.d,
then:
rebuild -lib foo/foo.d -oflibfoo.a
will include foo/bar.d in the target library, but
rebuild -lib -explicit foo/foo.d -oflibfoo.a
will not.


On some platforms (presently, GDC on Posix), it is also possible to build
shared libraries. From rebuild's perspective, a shared library must be able to
be used interchangeably with a standard library, so DMD's .dll's on Windows are
not supported. Such shared libraries can be built with:

rebuild -shlib -explicit foo/foo.d -oflibfoo.so


Rebuild allows you to save options usually passed to rebuild in a response
file. Use one line per argument, then choose the response file with:

rebuild -rf<filename>


Rebuild also accepts a few special pragma()'s in source files. These must be in
a version(build) block. The two supported pragmas are link and export_version.

pragma(link) is useful for indicating that a D source file depends on a
specified library. If the file depended on libxml2, for example, pragma(link)
would be used like so:

version(build) {
    pragma(link, "xml2");
}

On Posix and MingW, this links with -lxml2 (so it will link to libxml2.a or
libxml2.so). On Windows, this links to xml2.lib.


pragma(export_version) is used to set a version identifier for all source files
(as opposed to version=, which sets it only for a single source file):

version (build) {
    pragma(export_version, "setversion");
}


Rebuild has a large number of other available options. This document does not
list all of them. Use
rebuild --help
to get the entire list.


Rebuild uses configuration files for almost everything it does. These
configuration files are in the directory rebuild.conf, which is installed
either as /etc/rebuild or simply as rebuild.conf next to rebuild[.exe]. For the
most part, you should not need to edit them, but there are some options you may
wish to add:

include=<path>          Adds <path> to the include path rebuild uses.
path=<path>             Adds <path> to $PATH (or %PATH%) during each rebuild
                        run.
flags=<flags>           Acts as though <flags> were passed with every rebuild
                        run.