Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, extensibility and reproduceability. It supports a number of popular languages and can automate nearly any aspect of your build process.

See http://please.build for more information.

Currently Linux (tested on Ubuntu) and OSX are actively supported, and FreeBSD is known to work with a little setup (see FAQ for details).

The easiest way to install it on your own machine is to run:

curl -s https://get.please.build | bash

Then you simply run plz init at the root of your project to set up a default config and you're good to start adding BUILD files. See the website for more instructions about how to write them.

To build Please yourself, run ./bootstrap.sh in the repo root. This will set up the minimal environment needed to build Please, build it once manually and then rebuild it again using itself. You'll need to have Go 1.9+ installed to build Please although once built it can target Go 1.4+.

To build some of the parser engine backends, you will need to have Python libraries available; at least python 2 needs to be installed for now and, if available, alternatives will be built for python3 and PyPy. python3 also needs to be installed to build one or two of the builtin tools.

You will also need to have Java 7 or above installed to build some of the Java helper programs. Optional dependencies for various tests include unittest++ (sudo apt-get install libunittest++-dev), clang, gold and docker - none of those are required to build components so their tests will be excluded if they aren't available.

If you'd rather not worry about installing the dependencies, we provide a prebuilt Docker image based on Ubuntu which is capable of building the whole thing for you: docker run -it thoughtmachine/please

The core contributors so far are:

• Peter Ebden
• Will Montgomery
• Fabian Siddiqi
• Diana-Maria Costea
• Dimitar Pavlov

Progress has been slightly hindered by our fearless leader Paul who continually insists that we should "get on with our work" and "stop messing around with the build system". But he's not actually fired us for spending time on this which he has our thanks for.