scons VS doit

The most comprehensive make alternative in python I've seen is Scons (https://scons.org/)

It would be worth to see how they tackles some of the challenges you're looking into.

Blurb from the website:

SCons is an Open Source software construction tool. Think of SCons as an improved, cross-platform substitute for the classic Make utility with integrated functionality similar to autoconf/automake and compiler caches such as ccache. In short, SCons is an easier, more reliable and faster way to build software.

SCons never got popular enough to escape the niches it grew up in.

i literally do almost this exact thing with the game im working on. situation is: im the programmer, working with an artist who cant code (and im not going to make them edit json on an ipad lmao) so i have a google drive spreadsheet where they put metadata for the items they make. i have a script that uses rclone to copy this down as a csv, along with the image assets. then i wrote a python extension for scons that converts it to json (and also does some image processing/cropping because evidently procreate's export options are very limited). from here, i originally had an import plugin that would automatically import the json files as godot resources. however, i eventually decided to instead write a standalone script in gdscript (invoked with godot --script --headless myscript.gd) that would do the conversion ahead of import, mainly because i wanted to be able to have the game assets be more self-contained (like, so that an item has its texture in the same resource file instead of in a separate file referenced from the json). i then modified my scons build scripts to call this script.

it's a build tool, like cmake. https://scons.org/ you have to install it.

I like mage for Go and doit for Python.

Some competitors - Rake (ruby) - Bake - Earthly - SCons - doit

An alternative to Scons could be Doit (<https://pydoit.org/>), which if I remember correctly was built as a faster alternative to Scons. See also reasons of some users to prefer the later to other mentioned here: <https://pydoit.org/stories.html>.

If you code in Python, your probably should use the language as much as possible and avoid calling shell commands.

E.G:

- manipulate the file system with pathlib

- do hashes with hashlib

- zip with zipfile

- set error code with sys.exit

- use os.environ for env vars

- print to stderr with print(..., file=...)

- sometimes you'll need to install lib. Like, if you want to manipulate a git repo, instead of calling the git command, use gitpython (https://gitpython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/)

But if you don't feel like installing a too many libs, or just really want to call commands because you know them well, then the "sh" lib is going to make things smoother:

https://pypi.org/project/sh/

Also, enjoy the fact Python comes with argparse to parse script arguments (or if you feel like installing stuff, use typer). It sucks to do it in bash .

If what you need is more build oriented, like something to replace "make", then I would instead recommend "doit":

https://pydoit.org/

It's the only task runner that I haven't run away from yet.

Remember to always to everything in a venv. But you can have a giant venv for all the scripts, and just she-bang the venv python executable so that it's transparent. Things don't have to be difficult.

I've been using Doit for a project which involves gathering together documents made up of multiple Markdown files and converting to multiple formats. It's really cool but has some irritations. It didn't end up being much simpler than Make for me. I'm interested in trying some of the alternatives people have posted.

The code for all of this is available here, and described in detail in my article. I'm particularly fan of doit for this type of project, and highly encourage everyone to check it out!

Instead, I use pydoit (which is basically a Python version of make). It's simple, flexible, and quite extensible. So, here's what I do with it: