Welcome To wasp

wasp is yet another build tool! It started as a private research project but evolved into a standalone python based build tool and task automation framework. wasp was inspired by many great tools such as cmake, ant, gradle and many more.

Features and Non-Features

• wasp does not invent yet another language: it uses plain python. Thus, build scripts are not declarative but are executable programs. Great care was taken while designing the API to make sure build scripts read fluently. wasp is also a library and build scripts are python modules. It can therefore be integrated with other python libraries and nothing is obscured from the user.

• The wasp-script can be checked into version control systems and extracts itself. The only requirement for its use is a python3 installation. Deploying your build tool is therefore really easy.

• wasp favors convention over configuration. While everything can be customized, a lot of defaults are already in place and make you productive from the start.

• Since wasp is also library, customization of the build tasks can be done on many levels and therefore existing code can be effectively reused. Think of your build scripts as programs and not as configuration.

• wasp tries to simplify complex tasks and does not focus on simplifying tasks that are already simple. As your project grows more complex, so does your build process. wasp tries to keep up with the increased complexity by providing few, but powerful tools to simplify your build process. Since wasp is not limited to a specific set of technologies, it scales with your project and the number of technologies you use.

• No magic happens: Everything is explicit. For example, this means that no automatic scanning of file system access is performed to determine task dependencies and that task sources and targets must be defined. Of course, there are abstractions and conventions which make default choices for you and automatically define dependencies between your tasks.

wasp is for you if....

• you want flexible build tool for automating a large number of build tasks

• if you don't use a single technology with one associated set of tooling, but multiple technologies and tools that need to interact.

• you want to be able to create a build system that can be easily deployed on many platforms.

• you want to integrate multiple projects each with individual build tools into one large project.

wasp is not for you if...

• you only have trivial tasks to perform. You're probably better of with one of the less general purpose tools.

• you have never seen python before and are not willing to learn (a very awesome) new programming language.

• using python3 (instead of python2) is somehow impossible/difficult for you.

• if you want something declarative. The fact that wasp is not declarative was a very delibrate design descision.