How to generate phony target by premake? - makefile

Question

I have been used premake for a while. When I have to run small script or something which seems to be unrelated to build phase(e.g. debug, packaging, build for external libraries etc...), I just used Makefile project for that like below
-- [[ X. External Makefile libraries ]]
project "external"
kind "Makefile"
location "build"
buildcommands {
"cd ..; make -f Makefile"
}
cleancommands {
"cd ..; make -f Makefile clean"
}
-- [[ X+1. Integration ]]
project "integration"
kind "Makefile"
location "build"
buildcommands {
-- PacketNgin Application Library
"ar x ../libc.a",
"ar x ../libm.a",
"ar x ../libtlsf.a",
"ar x ../libcore.a",
"ar x ../libexpat.a",
"ar rcs ../libpacketngin.a *.o",
"cp -rL ../core/include/* ../../include",
"cp -rL ../expat/include/* ../../include",
"cp -rL ../openssl/include/* ../../include",
"cp -rL ../zlib/*.h ../../include",
"rm ./*.o -rf",
-- Linux Application library
"ar x ../libtlsf.a ", -- Blank is added at the end on purpose
"ar x ../libcore_linux.a",
"ar rcs ../libumpn.a *.o",
"rm ./*.o -rf ", -- Blank is added at the end on purpose
}
cleancommands {
"rm *.o -rf",
"rm ../*.a -rf"
}
I realize this practice is very confused since it does not separates real build Makefile from just phony targets, even make unecessary Makefiles for build. So, I want to figure out generate phony target by premake.
I considered newaction syntax but I found it just make target for premake script rather than Makefile target.
Is there any best practice or way to generate phony target by premake?

Answer 1

Creating arbitrary phony targets is not supported by Premake at this time (though you can submit a feature request or tackle it yourself and create a pull request).
But you could use Premake itself to run the commands for you. Here's a simple example that creates a new action called "integrate":
function executeAll(commands)
for _, command in ipairs(commands) do
os.execute(command)
end
end
newaction
{
trigger = "integrate",
description = "Run integration steps",
execute = function ()
executeAll {
"ar x ../libc.a",
"ar x ../libm.a",
"ar x ../libtlsf.a",
"ar x ../libcore.a",
"ar x ../libexpat.a",
"ar rcs ../libpacketngin.a *.o",
-- and so on...
}
end
}
Once added to your project script, you can call it like:
$ premake5 integrate