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Comment by Galanwe | Hacker News Reader

It's a great habit.

I use that same concept extensively for all my projects, whatever the language/stack, though I prefer to use Makefiles since I feel like it creates a more cohesive result. Very easy to chain, depend and read in the CI too.

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+1 for make. Its an amazing and underrated tool.

Agreed. A great many things can be expressed as a graph of sub-tasks with preconditions and dependencies that create a partial ordering, and make is pretty darn good at grinding through such graphs. You can go far with just the basics plus a couple of extra tricks like "phony" targets.

It took me forever to come around on make, but I absolutely love it for things like this now.

Any recommendations on learning to use make more effectively outside of just reading the docs? I feel like this is a glaring gap in my knowledge as I really only know the basics.

I'd say gnu make (dont use any other make) can be learned from the documentation, it readable. Also, it's super simple to try things yourself (unlike, say, k8s by example) : just use it in your project and use the doc as needed. I am very fond of make, to the point I did a video transcoding solution based on it and ffmpeg.

Related trick: GNU tools tend to come with Info pages - it's to man pages what a book is to a listicle. These Info pages can get you up to speed quickly, while giving you a deeper understanding of the tool at the same time.

Read a lot of other people's Makefiles. I tend to shy away from huge/overly complex ones, but there's a lot of good examples out there where I got most of my ideas/habits/patterns from.

Hmm, unfortunately I don't. I didn't really bookmark anything when I was learning. IIRC, I spent most of my time in the docs though.

Yes, anything I do public facing is likely to use make/docker. It really cuts down on the mental energy I need to expend thinking about differing environments/bootstrapping.

Can you give an example on how you use make for simple things like this ? I want to get into it for non C++ projects, and it's a little daunting to make the leap.

Here is a starting point for a AWS SAM Golang project. It even comes with a `make help` command.

https://gist.github.com/cgarvis/61d70eeb1288bfee540c59cad095...

Thanks!

Here's one of mine for a project I'm working on today:

https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/mothership/src/branch/master/Makef...

I love this! Used to do it, too, but currently we’re stuck in windows. What do you do then? (IT blocks WSL so not that)

GNU make is available on windows. If you run it via git-bash then it should mostly "just work" (though there will be some idiosyncracies to work out). I tested this project and it all runs on linux/osx/windows: https://github.com/J-Swift/cod-stats

Not an easy sell in my experience, windows people think it’s strange to install an archaic C build system as an add-on. And some people even git in cmd. It’s just not easy to get people on board with it.

When used as I would recommend, GNU Make is not a build system, its a task runner. Its a language agnostic gulp or npm package.json scripts runner. You can run anything you want (even powershell!) in the targets, its just a standard way to package them up together and declare task dependencies.

I know and support the approach, but have to keep «selling» this. Make documents itself as a C compilation system. I think it’s actually a better task runner! Python’s tox and invoke are nice, but much more noisy and language-specific.

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