1# Ninja 2 3Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. 4https://ninja-build.org/ 5 6See [the manual](https://ninja-build.org/manual.html) or 7`doc/manual.asciidoc` included in the distribution for background 8and more details. 9 10Binaries for Linux, Mac and Windows are available on 11 [GitHub](https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/releases). 12Run `./ninja -h` for Ninja help. 13 14Installation is not necessary because the only required file is the 15resulting ninja binary. However, to enable features like Bash 16completion and Emacs and Vim editing modes, some files in misc/ must be 17copied to appropriate locations. 18 19If you're interested in making changes to Ninja, read 20[CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) first. 21 22## Building Ninja itself 23 24You can either build Ninja via the custom generator script written in Python or 25via CMake. For more details see 26[the wiki](https://github.com/ninja-build/ninja/wiki). 27 28### Python 29 30``` 31./configure.py --bootstrap 32``` 33 34This will generate the `ninja` binary and a `build.ninja` file you can now use 35to build Ninja with itself. 36 37### CMake 38 39``` 40cmake -Bbuild-cmake 41cmake --build build-cmake 42``` 43 44The `ninja` binary will now be inside the `build-cmake` directory (you can 45choose any other name you like). 46 47To run the unit tests: 48 49``` 50./build-cmake/ninja_test 51``` 52 53## Generating documentation 54 55### Ninja Manual 56 57You must have `asciidoc` and `xsltproc` in your PATH, then do: 58 59``` 60./configure.py 61ninja manual doc/manual.pdf 62``` 63 64Which will generate `doc/manual.html`. 65 66To generate the PDF version of the manual, you must have `dblatext` in your PATH then do: 67 68``` 69./configure.py # only if you didn't do it previously. 70ninja doc/manual.pdf 71``` 72 73Which will generate `doc/manual.pdf`. 74 75### Doxygen documentation 76 77If you have `doxygen` installed, you can build documentation extracted from C++ 78declarations and comments to help you navigate the code. Note that Ninja is a standalone 79executable, not a library, so there is no public API, all details exposed here are 80internal. 81 82``` 83./configure.py # if needed 84ninja doxygen 85``` 86 87Then open `doc/doxygen/html/index.html` in a browser to look at it. 88