Please is a cross-language build system with an emphasis on high performance, extensibility and reproducibility. It supports a number of popular languages and can automate nearly any aspect of your build process.

See http://please.build for more information.

Currently Linux (tested on Ubuntu), macOS and FreeBSD are actively supported.

The easiest way to install it on your own machine is to run:

curl -s https://get.please.build | bash

Or, if you prefer, grab one of the tarballs off our releases page and extract it yourself; it typically lives in ~/.please.

You can also install using Homebrew:

brew tap thought-machine/please
brew install please

Then you simply run plz init at the root of your project to set up a default config and you're good to start adding BUILD files. See the website for more instructions about how to write them.

There are various commands available to interact with Please, the most obvious & useful ones initially are plz build and plz test to build things & run tests respectively. See plz --help or the documentation for more comprehensive information.

To build Please yourself, run ./bootstrap.sh in the repo root. This will bootstrap a minimal version of Please using Go and then rebuild it using itself. You'll need to have Go 1.11+ installed to build Please although once built it can target any version from 1.8+ onwards.

Optional dependencies for various tests include Python, Java, clang, gold and docker - none of those are required to build components so their tests will be excluded if they aren't available.

If you'd rather not worry about installing the dependencies, we provide a prebuilt Docker image based on Ubuntu which is capable of building the whole thing for you: docker run -it thoughtmachine/please_ubuntu

You can install a locally built copy of Please using plz install, or if it's the first time, by running ./install.sh after it's built. This will overwrite whatever you currently have in ~/.please with your local version, although you can get back to a released version again by running plz update --force.

• Quickstart
• Commands & command-line arguments
• Built-in rules
• BUILD language reference
• Custom build rules
• Config reference
• FAQ

Please is released & we consider it stable; we follow semver for releases, so major versions indicate potentially breaking changes to the BUILD language, command line or other behaviour. We try to minimise this where possible.

We're very happy to accept pull requests & feature requests, and bugs if it's not working for you. We don't always have time for everything since Please is only part-time work for us, but we'll do our best.