Writing Your Own Builders

SCons User Guide 0.98.0
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# Chapter 17. Writing Your Own Builders

Although SCons provides many useful methods for building common software products: programs, libraries, documents. you frequently want to be able to build some other type of file not supported directly by SCons Fortunately, SCons makes it very easy to define your own `Builder` objects for any custom file types you want to build. (In fact, the SCons interfaces for creating `Builder` objects are flexible enough and easy enough to use that all of the the SCons built-in `Builder` objects are created the mechanisms described in this section.)

# 17.1. Writing Builders That Execute External Commands

The simplest `Builder` to create is one that executes an external command. For example, if we want to build an output file by running the contents of the input file through a command named `foobuild`, creating that `Builder` might look like:

           bld = Builder(action = 'foobuild < $SOURCE > $TARGET')

All the above line does is create a free-standing `Builder` object. The next section will show us how to actually use it.

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Variant Builds |  | Attaching a Builder to a `Construction Environment`