happytinafu / ninja

a small build system with a focus on speed

Ninja

Ninja is a small build system with a focus on speed. https://ninja-build.org/

See the manual or doc/manual.asciidoc included in the distribution for background and more details.

Binaries for Linux, Mac, and Windows are available at GitHub. Run ./ninja -h for Ninja help.

Installation is not necessary because the only required file is the resulting ninja binary. However, to enable features like Bash completion and Emacs and Vim editing modes, some files in misc/ must be copied to appropriate locations.

If you're interested in making changes to Ninja, read CONTRIBUTING.md first.

Building Ninja itself

You can either build Ninja via the custom generator script written in Python or via CMake. For more details see the wiki.

Python

./configure.py --bootstrap

This will generate the ninja binary and a build.ninja file you can now use to build Ninja with itself.

CMake

cmake -Bbuild-cmake -H.
cmake --build build-cmake

The ninja binary will now be inside the build-cmake directory (you can choose any other name you like).

To run the unit tests:

./build-cmake/ninja_test