An introduction to plugins

From Gallium

Warning this page came from an explanation on the mailing-list. Feel free to help us improving it.

Roughly an ocamlbuild plugin is an OCaml module called Myocamlbuild that should take place a the root of your project (myocamlbuild.ml). Automatically ocamlbuild will take care of it by compiling it and by making a myocamlbuild binary that is the classical ocamlbuild plus your module.

With this module you can make effects on the ocamlbuild engine by extending rules, flag injectors, dependencies injectors, libraries declarations... You can also change default options of ocamlbuild to avoid giving flags to ocamlbuild itself.

In order to properly sequence your effects ocamlbuild tells you to register your effects using the `dispatch' function that you will found in every ocamlbuild plugin. This function receive an argument that is an event, like After_rules that means that rules of the standard library have been setup.