Glossary
Buildfiles
Buildfiles provide re-usable definitions of portions of the dependency graph using Lua’s convenient syntactic sugar and the interface provided by the toolsets registered by the root build script.
Build Script
The build script, forge.lua, marks the root directory of the project and is executed to load and configure the modules and toolsets available when defining the dependency graph and building the project.
Command
Commands are the high-level instructions that a build can carry out, e.g. build, clean, install, etc. They are implemented as global functions in Lua and invoked by passing their names on the command line when invoking forge.
Rule
Rules associate targets with the Lua functions that determine what happens when a target is created, when dependencies are added, and when a target is built or cleaned.
Target
Targets are the nodes in the dependency graph. Typically each target has a one-to-one relationship with a file in the file system but there are also cases where targets have no associated file or many associated files.
Toolset
Toolsets are sets of variables and rules that provide a configuration and a convenient, largely declarative domain language for specifying the dependency graph.
Module
Modules package rules and default settings into resuable components that add support for different compilers, platforms, and tools (e.g. Clang, GCC, Mingw, and Microsoft Visual C++, support for building Android and/or iOS apps, and other tools like parser generators, or asset builders for video games).