2. Building the Application

Note

There are shell scripts waf.bat/waf.sh that activate the correct build environment before starting the build process. It is recommended to use these scripts to interact with the build system. If these shell scripts are not used to call the build tool the following steps are required:

  • activating the correct environment

  • the current working directory must be the repository root

  • instead of waf <some-command> use python3 tools/waf <some-command>

The following examples are using the shell script waf.bat

  1. Open a terminal and change into a checkout of the foxbms repository

  2. Configuration of the project

    C:\Users\vulpes\Documents\foxbms-2>waf configure

  3. Now all build variants are available, e.g., to build the binaries (build_bin) and the documentation (build_docs):

    C:\Users\vulpes\Documents\foxbms-2>waf build_bin build_docs

    Waf commands can be concatenated and are executed in the order of their appearance.

Important available commands are listed in Table 2.6.

Table 2.6 Available build and clean commands

Command/Option

Description

build_all

Shortcut to run all available build commands

build_bin

Builds the binaries

build_docs

Builds the documentation

build_unit_test

Builds and runs all unit tests for the embedded sources

clean_all

Shortcut to run all available clean commands

clean_bin

Cleans all binaries

clean_docs

Cleans the rendered documentation

clean_unit_test

Cleans all output files written during build_unit_test

You can profile the build process by running the following command:

C:\Users\vulpes\Documents\foxbms-2>waf build_bin --profile
C:\Users\vulpes\Documents\foxbms-2>gprof2dot -f pstats profile.txt | dot -Tpng -o profile.png

There are additional commands that are not typically needed when developing. This and other help on the build system is obtained by running

C:\Users\vulpes\Documents\foxbms-2>waf --help