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• Man Page always up to date
• User Guide latest stable - wip
• Documentation

Overview

• SConstruct
  • Equivalent to Makefile, CMakefile, Rakefile, etc.
  • Search order is SConstruct, Sconstruct, sconstruct
• Scons is chatty by default and prints lots of status messages.
  • Use -Q to suppress them.

• scons does not automatically propagate the external environment used to execute scons to the commands used to build target files.

  • Whenever you create an scons construction environment, you can propagate specific environment variables like this

    import os
    env = Environment(ENV = {'PATH' : os.environ['PATH'],
                             'HOME' : os.environ['HOME']})
    

    or all environment variables like this

    import os
    env = Environment(ENV = os.environ)
    

  • This comes at the expense of making your build dependent on the user's environment being set correctly, but it may be more convenient for many configurations.

Invoking builds

• Invoking scons as scons with no options will build all targets by default. If explicit default targets have been defined using the Default() rule, then these will be built instead.
• You can always explicitly build all targets by eecuting scons .
• scons subdir1/subdir2 from top level builds everything in subdir2 and below.
  • And if you're in subdir2, you can use the -u flag to tell scons to follow parent directories until it finds and SConstruct file. The target names can then be specified relative to subdir2.
• scons foo bar builds targets foo and bar.

Cleaning

• scons -c . will clean in the current directory and below.
• -c, --clean and --remove are synonyms.

Passing variables from cmdline to the script

Specify them on the command line like this:

scons debug=1 .

These variables are available in SConscript files through the ARGUMENTS dictionary, and can be used in the SConscript file(s) to modify the build in any way:

if ARGUMENTS.get('debug', 0):
    env = Environment(CCFLAGS = '-g')
else:
    env = Environment()

Command line options

In general, scons supports the same command-line options as GNU make, and many of those supported by cons.

• -Q
• Quiet mode. Scons is normally chatty.
• --interactive
  • The SConscript files are read once and a scons>>> prompt is printed. Targets may now be rebuilt by typing commands at interactive prompt without having to re-read the SConscript files and re-initialize the dependency graph from scratch.
• -n, --just-print, --dry-run, --recon
  • Dry run mode.`