Starting Your New Action

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When developing something as complex as a new exporter, it is a good idea to build it as a module. Doing so helps organize the code, provides a way to automate testing, and makes it easy to share your code with others.

So let's start by setting up a module containing a really simple action. Create a new file named lua.lua and place it into a folder named lua. Place this lua folder somewhere Premake can find it.

Copy this simple skeleton action definition into your lua.lua:

-- lua/lua.lua

premake.modules.lua = {}
local m = premake.modules.lua

local p = premake

newaction {
	trigger = "lua",
	description = "Export project information as Lua tables",

	onStart = function()
		print("Starting Lua generation")
	end,

	onWorkspace = function(wks)
		printf("Generating Lua for workspace '%s'", wks.name)
	end,

	onProject = function(prj)
		printf("Generating Lua for project '%s'", prj.name)
	end,

	execute = function()
		print("Executing Lua action")
	end,

	onEnd = function()
		print("Lua generation complete")
	end
}

return m

I'll explain what all of that means in a moment, but first let's try it out and make sure everything is working. To see our new action in action, we'll need to require it into an existing project's premake5.lua script.

require "lua"  -- add this to load your module

workspace "MyWorkspace"
	configurations { "Debug", "Release" }

project "MyProject"
	-- etc.

Then we can generate that project with our new lua action and see the print() functions get called.

$ premake5 lua
Building configurations...
Running action 'lua'...
Starting Lua generation
Generating Lua for workspace 'MyWorkspace'
Generating Lua for project 'MyProject'
Executing Lua action
Lua generation complete
Done.

(Quick side note: if you'd like to make this or any third-party module available without having to add a require() to every project script, just put that require("lua") call in your system script instead.)

Explain.

We start out by creating a table to hold our module's interface. Since we'll be referencing this interface quite a lot in our code, we assign it to the shortcut m for "module".

premake.modules.lua = {}
local m = premake.modules.lua

We will also be calling functions from the premake namespace frequently, so we assign that to the shortcut p for "premake".

local p = premake

Now we're ready to register our new action with Premake, using newaction().

newaction {
	trigger = "lua",
	description = "Export project information as Lua",

trigger is the token that should be typed on the Premake command line to cause our action to be triggered (i.e. premake5 lua).

description is the string which should appear in Premake's help text to describe what our action does. You can view this by running premake5 --help against the project script we modified above.

Next, we register callbacks for Premake to use when it is time to export the project:

onStart = function()
	print("Starting Lua generation")
end,

onWorkspace = function(wks)
	printf("Generating Lua for workspace '%s'", wks.name)
end,

onProject = function(prj)
	printf("Generating Lua for project '%s'", prj.name)
end,

execute = function()
	print("Executing Lua action")
end,

onEnd = function()
	print("Lua generation complete")
end

All of these callbacks are optional; you only need to include the ones you are actually interested in receiving.

onStart is called first to indicate that processing has begun.

onWorkspace is called once for every workspace that was declared, via the workspace() function, in the user's project script.

onProject is called once for every project that was declared, via the project() function, in the user's project script.

execute is called after all projects and workspaces have been processed. This is a good place to put more general code that doesn't require a workspace or project as input, and should only run once.

onEnd is called to indicate the processing is complete.

Finally, we return our module's interface back to the caller (the require("lua") call in our project or system script).

return m