Recently I had an opportunity to work with Ragel State Machine Compiler in my Qt project (There was a requirement to parse binary protocol), and the question was, how to integrate Ragel source files in the project conveniently. After all, I've read about qmake's QMAKE_EXTRA_COMPILERS facility, which does the job very well.
So, the final recipe: create the file ragel.pri:
# ------------ ragel compiler settings ------------ # output file: place in build dir, with "ragel_" prefix and without ".rl" suffix ragel.output = $$OUT_PWD/ragel_${QMAKE_FILE_IN_BASE} # ragel input files should be given in RAGEL_FILES variable ragel.input = RAGEL_FILES # command that should be executed to compile file ragel.commands = ragel ${QMAKE_FILE_IN} -o ${QMAKE_FILE_OUT} # variable to which generated filenames should be added ragel.variable_out = SOURCES # name (for internal qmake usage) ragel.name = RAGEL # add ragel as qmake extra compiler QMAKE_EXTRA_COMPILERS += ragel
And include this file to your main .pro file, like this:
include(ragel.pri) # ... the rest of project
After this, you can add files to be processed with ragel to RAGEL_FILES variable:
include(ragel.pri) RAGEL_FILES += path/to/my_ragel_file.cpp.rl # ... the rest of project
Now, during the build process, the file path/to/my_file.cpp.rl will be processed by ragel into output file my_build_dir/ragel_my_file.cpp and automatically added to SOURCES variable. Works great.
Of course, you need Ragel to be installed at your machine for the above to work.