What is aleph.build?

Aleph is a build tool, similar to make. It reads a file named aleph.build, which is a POSIX shell script where each line is a build step.

# Compile the object files
gcc -c -o main.o main.c
gcc -c -o utils.o utils.c

# Link the objects
gcc -o app main.o utils.o

Unlike make, you don’t declare dependencies manually. The first time you run aleph, it executes every step and records which files each command read and wrote. On subsequent runs, it skips steps whose inputs haven’t changed.

How do I use it?

Since aleph.build is also valid POSIX shell syntax, you can always build without installing anything:

sh ./aleph.build

To get incremental builds, install aleph:

curl -sSf https://aleph.build/install.sh | sh

If you don’t like piping code from the internet directly into your shell, you can also get the binary from the releases page or build it from source.