A quick introduction for people who arrived here directly: Premake is a build configuration tool. It reads a description of a software project and generates the files for one of several different toolsets. By using Premake, software developers can save time and support more tools and users. Learn More.

Getting Premake

If you don't have Premake already, you can download it now.

Premake is a small (around 200K) command line executable, delivered as a single file. Just unpack the download and place the executable on your system search path or anywhere else convenient.

Using Premake

The simplest Premake command is:

premake4 action

Usually you would like Premake to generate project files for a particular toolset, in which case action is one of these toolset identifiers:

You can see a complete list of actions and other options by typing:

premake4 --help

Once the files have been generated you can load the solution or workspace into your IDE and build as you normally would.

Using the Generated Makefiles

Running make with no options will build all targets using the default configuration. To build a different configuration supply the config argument:

make config=release

Most projects provide debug and release configurations; to see the available targets and configurations, type:

make help

Remove all generated binaries and intermediate files with:

make clean

Premake generated makefiles do not support a make install step. Instead, project owners are encouraged to add an install action to their Premake scripts, which has the advantage of working with any toolset on any platform. You can check for the existence of an install action by viewing the help (run premake4 --help in the project directory).

Next Steps

If you are having trouble building your project, start by contacting the project manager. If you are having trouble building or using Premake, visit our Support page and I'll try to help you out.

To learn how to use Premake for your own software projects see Scripting With Premake.