LALRPOP works as a preprocessor that is integrated with cargo. When LALRPOP is invoked, it will search your source directory for files with the extension lalrpop and create corresponding rs files. So, for example, if we have a file calculator.lalrpop, the preprocessor will create a Rust file calculator.rs. As an aside, the syntax of LALRPOP intentionally hews fairly close to Rust, so it should be possible to use the Rust plugin to edit lalrpop files as well, as long as it's not too picky (the emacs rust-mode, in particular, works just fine).

To start, let's use cargo new to make a new project. We'll call it calculator:

> cargo new --bin calculator

We now have to edit the generated calculator/Cargo.toml file to invoke the LALRPOP preprocessor. The resulting file should look something like:

[package]
name = "calculator"
version = "0.1.0"
authors = ["Niko Matsakis <niko@alum.mit.edu>"]

[build-dependencies] # <-- We added this and everything after!
lalrpop = "0.17.0"

[dependencies]
lalrpop-util = "0.17.0"
regex = "0.2.1"

Cargo can run build scripts as a pre-processing step, named build.rs by default. The [build-dependencies] section specifies the dependencies for build scripts -- in this case, just LALRPOP.

The [dependencies] section describes the dependencies that LALRPOP needs at runtime. All LALRPOP parsers require at least the lalrpop-util crate. In addition, if you don't want to write the lexer by hand, you need to add a dependency on the regex crate. (If you don't know what a lexer is, don't worry, it's not important just now, though we will cover it in the next section; if you do know what a lexer is, and you want to know how to write a lexer by hand and use it with LALRPOP, then check out the lexer tutorial.)

Next we have to add build.rs itself. This should just look like the following:

extern crate lalrpop;

fn main() {
    lalrpop::process_root().unwrap();
}

The function process_root processes your src directory, converting all lalrpop files into rs files. It is smart enough to check timestamps and do nothing if the rs file is newer than the lalrpop file, and to mark the generated rs file as read-only. It returns an io::Result<()>, so the unwrap() call just asserts that no file-system errors occurred.

NOTE: On Windows, the necessary APIs are not yet stable, so timestamp checking is disabled.