This is a simple script to parse out compiler invocations from a build log and generate a compile_commands.json compilation database. This might be useful on macOS or in any other case where Bear doesn't work correctly. Theoretically any build log that contains full compiler invocations (e.g. gcc -c -o foo.o -DENABLE_SOME_FEATURE -I./include foo.c) should work, but I've only tested pretty limited cases.

log2compdb takes three arguments:

• The build log file, with -i/--in
• The path to the desired output file, with -o/--out (defaults to compile_commands.json in the current directory)
• The compiler used in that build log, with -c/--compiler — an absolute path works best, but isn't required
  • If your build log has multiple compilers (for example if your build includes host and cross compilation objects), then -c can be specified multiple times.

Let's take the firmware repository for the Black Magic Probe project for an example. Many build systems don't output the compiler invocations by default, requiring a variable like BUILD_VERBOSE=1 or V=1. In Blackmagic's case, it looks like this:

$ make V=1 > build.log

It can be important that you don't pass a -j argument (other than -j1), as log2compdb uses directory change log entries as well, which will be out of order if you build in parallel.

Non-parallel builds can take a while, so you might want to include the build output in your terminal as well with something like:

$ make V=1 | tee /dev/stderr > build.log

After that, you can run log2compdb, telling it the path to the build log, and the compiler used in the build. In the case of the Black Magic Probe firmware, that's going to be arm-none-eabi-gcc, which on my system is in /opt/homebrew/bin, so for me generating the compile_commands.json looks like this:

$ log2compdb -i build.log -o compile_commands.json -c /opt/homebrew/bin/arm-none-eabi-gcc

Alternatively, you can also tell log2comp2db to read from standard in, and skip the extra file:

$ make V=1 | tee /dev/stderr | log2compdb -o compile_commands.json -c /opt/homebrew/bin/arm-none-eabi/gcc

log2compdb is packaged on PyPI, and can be installed with Python packaging tools, such as pip:

$ pip install log2compdb

If your compiler is managed with Nix, log2compdb will miss any compiler arguments inserted by Nix's compiler wrappers. In many cases this will not matter, but you can run the build with the environment variable NIX_DEBUG=1 to have Nix's compiler wrappers print the compiler arguments they insert, and log2compdb can parse this information, however it is printed to stderr, not stdout, so make sure to redirect stderr to the build log or log2compdb's input:

$ env NIX_DEBUG=1 make V=1 2>&1 | tee /dev/stderr > build.log
$ log2compdb -i build.log -c /nix/store/9nj6qjqp0d25giirzj9f0k35g2s58g0h-gcc-wrapper-11.3.0/bin/gcc