5.2 Other Operations

ASDF provides three commands for the most common system operations: load-system, compile-system, and test-system. It also provides require-system, a version of load-system that skips trying to update systems that are already loaded.

Because ASDF is an extensible system for defining operations on components, it also provides a generic function operate (which is usually abbreviated by oos, which stands for operate-on-system). You’ll use oos whenever you want to do something beyond compiling, loading and testing.

Output from ASDF and ASDF extensions are sent to the CL stream *standard-output*, so rebinding that stream around calls to asdf:operate should redirect all output from ASDF operations.

For advanced users, note that require-system calls load-system with keyword arguments :force-not (already-loaded-systems). already-loaded-systems returns a list of the names of loaded systems. load-system applies operate with the operation from *load-system-operation* (which by default is load-op), the system, and any provided keyword arguments.