Write Once, Build Once, Anywhere

A build system for microservices

Bob is a high-level build system that isolates pipelines from the host system by executing them in a sandboxed shell to run them anywhere - Nix Inside™.

Why is this useful?

• Get rid of "Works on My Machine".
• No more building in Docker.
• Easily jump between different versions of a programming language.

Getting Started

Documentation is available at bob.build

Install

install

If you wanna go wild and have Go 1.17 or later installed, the short version is:

git clone https://github.com/benchkram/bob
cd bob
go install

For shell autocompletion (bash and zsh supported) add source <(bob completion) to your .bashrc/.zshrc.

How it works

Bobs generates its internal build graph from tasks described in a bob.yaml file (usually refered to as "Bobfile"). Each build step is executed in a sandbox shell only using the given dependecies required from the nix package manager.

The basic components of a build task are:

• input: Whenever an input changes, the task's commands need to be re-executed.
• cmd: Commands to be executed
• target: Files, directories or docker images created during execution of cmd
• dependencies Dependencies managed by the Nix package manager

Example of a bob.yaml file:

build:
  build:
    input: "*"
    cmd: go build -o ./app
    target: ./app
    dependencies: [ git, go_1_18 ]

Multiline sh and bash commands are entirely possible, powered by mvdan/sh.

Comparisons

• Dagger vs. bob
• Mage vs. bob