Zig Build System

The Zig Build System provides a cross-platform, dependency-free way to declare the logic required to build a project. With this system, the logic to build a project is written in a build.zig file, using the Zig Build System API to declare and configure build artifacts and other tasks.

Some examples of tasks the build system can help with:

• Performing tasks in parallel and caching the results.
• Depending on other projects.
• Providing a package for other projects to depend on.
• Creating build artifacts by executing the Zig compiler. This includes building Zig source code as well as C and C++ source code.
• Capturing user-configured options and using those options to configure the build.
• Surfacing build configuration as comptime values by providing a file that can be imported by Zig code.
• Caching build artifacts to avoid unnecessarily repeating steps.
• Executing build artifacts or system-installed tools.
• Running tests and verifying the output of executing a build artifact matches the expected value.
• Running zig fmt on a codebase or a subset of it.
• Custom tasks.

To use the build system, run zig build —help to see a command-line usage help menu. This will include project-specific options that were declared in the build.zig script.

For the time being, the build system documentation is hosted externally: Build System Documentation