meson(1) User Commands meson(1)
NAME
meson - a high productivity build system
DESCRIPTION
Meson is a build system designed to optimize programmer productivity. It
aims to do this by providing simple, out-of-the-box support for modern
software development tools and practices, such as unit tests, coverage
reports, Valgrind, Ccache and the like.
The main Meson executable provides many subcommands to access all the
functionality.
The setup command
Using Meson is simple and follows the common two-phase process of most
build systems. First you run Meson to configure your build:
meson setup [ options ] [ build directory ] [ source directory ]
Note that the build directory must be different from the source
directory. Meson does not support building inside the source directory
and attempting to do that leads to an error.
After a successful configuration step you can build the source by running
the actual build command in the build directory. The default backend of
Meson is Ninja, which can be invoked like this.
ninja [ target ]
You only need to run the Meson command once: when you first configure
your build dir. After that you just run the build command. Meson will
autodetect changes in your source tree and regenerate all files needed to
build the project.
The setup command is the default operation. If no actual command is
specified, Meson will assume you meant to do a setup. That means that you
can set up a build directory without the setup command like this:
meson [ options ] [ build directory ] [ source directory ]
options:
--version
print version number
--help print command line help
The configure command
meson configure provides a way to configure a Meson project from the
command line. Its usage is simple:
meson configure [ build directory ] [ options to set ]
If build directory is omitted, the current directory is used instead.
If no parameters are set, meson configure will print the value of all
build options to the console.
To set values, use the -D command line argument like this.
meson configure -Dopt1=value1 -Dopt2=value2
The introspect command
Meson introspect is a command designed to make it simple to integrate
with other tools, such as IDEs. The output of this command is in JSON.
meson introspect [ build directory ] [ option ]
If build directory is omitted, the current directory is used instead.
options:
--targets
print all top level targets (executables, libraries, etc)
--target-files
print the source files of the given target
--buildsystem-files
print all files that make up the build system (meson.build,
meson.options, meson_options.txt etc)
--tests
print all unit tests
--help print command line help
The test command
meson test is a helper tool for running test suites of projects using
Meson. The default way of running tests is to invoke the default build
command:
ninja [ test ]
meson test provides a richer set of tools for invoking tests.
meson test automatically rebuilds the necessary targets to run tests when
used with the Ninja backend. Upon build failure, meson test will return
an exit code of 125. This return code tells git bisect run to skip the
current commit. Thus bisecting using git can be done conveniently like
this.
git bisect run meson test -C build_dir
options:
--repeat
run tests as many times as specified
--gdb run tests under gdb
--list list all available tests
--wrapper
invoke all tests via the given wrapper (e.g. valgrind)
-C Change into the given directory before running tests (must be root
of build directory).
--suite
run tests in this suite
--no-suite
do not run tests in this suite
--no-stdsplit
do not split stderr and stdout in test logs
--benchmark
run benchmarks instead of tests
--logbase
base of file name to use for writing test logs
--num-processes
how many parallel processes to use to run tests
--verbose
do not redirect stdout and stderr
-t a multiplier to use for test timeout values (usually something
like 100 for Valgrind)
--setup
use the specified test setup
The wrap command
Wraptool is a helper utility to manage source dependencies using the
online wrapdb service.
meson wrap < command > [ options ]
You should run this command in the top level source directory of your
project.
Commands:
list list all available projects
search search projects by name
install
install a project with the given name
update update the specified project to latest available version
info show available versions of the specified project
status show installed and available versions of currently used
subprojects
EXIT STATUS
0 Successful.
1 Usage error, or an error parsing or executing meson.build.
2 Internal error.
125 meson test could not rebuild the required targets.
SEE ALSO
http://mesonbuild.com/
https://wrapdb.mesonbuild.com/
meson 1.1.0 April 2023 meson(1)
meson 1.1.0 - Generated Fri Apr 14 13:18:42 CDT 2023