How to generate phony target by premake?

Question

I have been used premake for a while. When I have to run small script or something which seems to be unrelated to build phase(e.g. debug, packaging, build for external libraries etc...), I just used Makefile project for that like below

    -- [[ X. External Makefile libraries ]]
project "external"
    kind "Makefile"
    location "build"

    buildcommands {
        "cd ..; make -f Makefile" 
    }

    cleancommands {
        "cd ..; make -f Makefile clean" 
    }

-- [[ X+1. Integration ]]
project "integration"
    kind "Makefile"
    location "build"

    buildcommands {
        -- PacketNgin Application Library
        "ar x ../libc.a",
        "ar x ../libm.a",
        "ar x ../libtlsf.a",
        "ar x ../libcore.a",
        "ar x ../libexpat.a",
        "ar rcs ../libpacketngin.a *.o",

    "cp -rL ../core/include/* ../../include",
    "cp -rL ../expat/include/* ../../include",
    "cp -rL ../openssl/include/* ../../include",
    "cp -rL ../zlib/*.h ../../include",

        "rm ./*.o -rf",

        -- Linux Application library
        "ar x ../libtlsf.a ",       -- Blank is added at the end on purpose
        "ar x ../libcore_linux.a",
        "ar rcs ../libumpn.a *.o",
        "rm ./*.o -rf ",            -- Blank is added at the end on purpose
    }

    cleancommands {
        "rm *.o -rf",
        "rm ../*.a -rf"
    }

I realize this practice is very confused since it does not separates real build Makefile from just phony targets, even make unecessary Makefiles for build. So, I want to figure out generate phony target by premake.

I considered newaction syntax but I found it just make target for premake script rather than Makefile target.

Is there any best practice or way to generate phony target by premake?

Answer 1

Creating arbitrary phony targets is not supported by Premake at this time (though you can submit a feature request or tackle it yourself and create a pull request).

But you could use Premake itself to run the commands for you. Here's a simple example that creates a new action called "integrate":

function executeAll(commands)
    for _, command in ipairs(commands) do
        os.execute(command)
    end
end

newaction
{
    trigger = "integrate",
    description = "Run integration steps",
    execute = function ()
        executeAll {
            "ar x ../libc.a",
            "ar x ../libm.a",
            "ar x ../libtlsf.a",
            "ar x ../libcore.a",
            "ar x ../libexpat.a",
            "ar rcs ../libpacketngin.a *.o",
            -- and so on...
        }
    end
}

Once added to your project script, you can call it like:

$ premake5 integrate