Bob

Inspired by Make and Bazel · Made for humans

Bob is a build system, a task runner as well as tooling for Git Multi-repos, all bundled into a single binary.

With bob, you can:

• Build your programs efficiently, as Bob tracks build inputs and caches compiled outputs, providing fast incremental builds.
• Run local development environments, whether they are simple binaries, docker-compose files, or a mix of both.
• Multi-Repo Tooling Easily manage multi-repo setups, with bulk Git operations.

⚠️⚠️⚠️ Warning: Bob and its documentation is in a early stage. Most of the features are fully-functional and tested, but some details are yet to be ironed out.

Install

Release builds

Download the latest release from GitHub.

Install from Source

If you already have Go 1.16 or later installed, the short version is:

go install github.com/benchkram/bob@latest

For shell autocompletion (bash and zsh supported) add source <(bob completion) to your .bashrc/.zshrc.

Build System

Bobs generates its internal build graph from tasks described in a bob.yaml file (we usually refer to it as "bobfile").
The basic components of a build task are:

• input: Whenever an input changes, the task's commands need to be re-executed [default: *]
• cmd: Commands to be executed
• target: File(s) or directories that are created when the commands are run and can be reused in other tasks.

Example of a bob.yaml file:

build:
  build:
    input: ./main.go
    cmd: go build -o ./app
    target: ./app

Multiline sh and bash commands are entirely possible, and are powered by mvdan/sh.

Take a look into the server-db example for a step-by-step tutorial.

Local Development

Our goal is to create a world-class local development experience by integrating seamlessly with the build-system and enabling you to start right after cloning a repository. Let the build-system create binaries and docker images, then execute & control them from one terminal using bob run. No more back-and-forth tab switching.

Ideally, those are the only two commands necessary to get started when joining a new project that uses Bob:

git clone
bob run

Web Server Example

Individual steps for web server development are likely similar to this:

1. Code generation using an IDL, like openapi or protobuf
2. Compile a server binary
3. Run a database in docker
4. Run the server

Those build/run tasks can be described in a bob.yaml file. This allows bob run to launch and give you control to a local development environment.

An in-depth example is available here.

Multi-repo Git Tooling

Bob enables a natural feeling git workflow for Git multi-repo setups without relying on Git Submodules.

To do this, Bob uses the concept of a "workspace" to track other git repositories. Inside a workspace you can use the usual every day git-operations through bob with visually enhanced output for the multi-repo cases.

Here is an example of bob git status in a workspace:

Highlighted directories indicate child Git repositories and therefore bob git add and bob git commit will only operate on the repository a file belongs to allowing to create repository overlapping commits all together.

Take a look into the bob git README for the current status.

Setting Up a Workspace

To set up a new bob workspace you first have to initialize it:

bob workspace init

This creates a .bob.workspace file and initializes a new git repository in the current directory.

Adding repositories to the workspace:

bob workspace add [email protected]:benchkram/bob.git
bob clone # calls git clone for missing repos

Cloning an existing workspace from a remote git repository:

bob clone [email protected]:benchkram/bob.git

Documentation

Full documentation of Bob is available at bob.build

Dependencies

A list of Bob's top dependencies:

• charmbracelet/bubbletea - Used in Bob's Terminal User Interface
• docker/compose - Enables us to run docker-compose files the same way docker compose does
• sh - Parsing/execution of shell commands