Plugin Development

Introduction

XMake supports the plugin module and we can conveniently develop our own plugin modules.

We can run the command xmake -h to look over some built-in plugins of xmake

Plugins:
    l, lua                                 Run the lua script.
    m, macro                               Run the given macro.
       doxygen                             Generate the doxygen document.
       hello                               Hello xmake!
       project                             Create the project file.

• lua: Run a given lua script.
• macro: Record and playback some xmake commands repeatedly.
• doxygen: Generate doxygen documentation automatically.
• hello: The demo plugin and only prints: 'hello xmake!'
• project: Generate project files for IDEs. It can generate make, cmake, vs, xcode (needs cmake), ninja project files, compile_commands.json, and compile_flags.txt

Quick Start

Now let's write a simple plugin demo for printing 'hello xmake!'

-- define a plugin task
task("hello")

    -- set the category for showing it in plugin category menu (optional)
    set_category("plugin")

    -- the main entry of the plugin
    on_run(function ()

        -- print 'hello xmake!'
        print("hello xmake!")
    end)

    -- set the menu options, but we put empty options now.
    set_menu {
                -- usage
                usage = "xmake hello [options]"

                -- description
            ,   description = "Hello xmake!"

                -- options
            ,   options = {}
            }

The file tree of this plugin:

plugins
|-- hello
|  |-- xmake.lua
|...
| notice no xmake.lua in plugins directory

Now one of the most simple plugins is finished. How does xmake detect it? There are three ways:

1. Put this plugin directory into xmake/plugins in the source code as a built-in plugin.
2. Put this plugin directory into ~/.xmake/plugins as a global user plugin.
3. Put this plugin directory (hello) into the ./plugins directory of the current project and call add_plugindirs("plugins") in xmake.lua as a local project plugin.

Run Plugin

Next we run this plugin

xmake hello

The result is

hello xmake!

Finally, we can also run this plugin in the custom scripts of xmake.lua

target("demo")

    -- run this plugin after building target
    after_build(function (target)

        -- import task module
        import("core.project.task")

        -- run the plugin task
        task.run("hello")
    end)