Cheat sheet

This page lists the commands to invoke to achieve some common build tasks with Meson. Unless otherwise specified all the examples below assume that the build directory is created in a directory called build which is located in the source tree's root. It is also assumed that all commands are executed in that directory.

Producing a coverage report

First initialise the build directory with this command.

meson --enable-gcov ..

Then issue the following commands.

ninja
ninja test
ninja coverage-html (or coverage-xml)

The coverage report can be found in the meson-logs subdirectory.

Using Clang and the static analyzer

Clang comes with a selection of analysis tools such as the address sanitizer. They are enabled by adding a few compiler flags. In addition we set the compiler to clang, though the sanitizers work with recent GCC versions, too.

First we set up meson.

CC=clang CFLAGS='-fsanitize=address -fno-omit-frame-pointer' meson ..

This example uses only plain C. For C++ you would set the variables CXX and CXXFLAGS, respectively.

After this you just compile your code and run the test suite. Address sanitizer will abort executables which have errors so they show up as test failures.