Makext is a collection of useful extensions for Makefiles, aimed at simplifying and enhancing the functionality of Make-based projects. These extensions provide additional features and convenience functions to improve the overall usage of GNU Make as a task runner.
All the extensions are written in GNU Make so no other languages are used making this very embedable and has zero dependencies other than GNU Make.
Other than makext.mk
all the other files in the repository are either
license or readme files or just testing data that is/are not needed to
use it.
Note
This extensions are abusing GNU Make in some sense since it was not meant to really be a task runner. Keep that in mind. However, despite that, I constantly find myself using it as such.
Extension | Description |
---|---|
help | Displays all targets with a comment in help format. |
assure | Check for the existence of programs on a machine. |
environment | Loads environmental variables from other files. |
Additional features:
- Automatic description inclusion in help message.
- Automatic license inclusion in help message.
Tested on:
- GNU Linux Debian 12 with GNU Make 4.3
- macOS Sonoma 14.4.1 with GNU Make 3.81
If you have an idea for a new feature open a new issue.
First you will need to download makext.mk
file from the repository to
the same directory where you have Makefile
.
wget -O makext.mk https://github.com/mitjafelicijan/makext/raw/master/makext.mk
Now you can include it in your Makefile
.
include makext.mk
help: .help
Important
Make sure you create first target help: .help
before any other
targets in your Makefile
. GNU Make will execute first target if
no target provided as an argument when calling make
.
One of the extensions is .help
which displays all the targets in the
Makefile
and their descriptions which are provided as comments next
to the target definition.
Lets check how and example Makefile
would look like. It
is recommended to use .PHONY
for targets that are not
actual files. In the example below I am not doing that
though, but it is wise to follow that rule. Check 4.6 Phony
Targets
section in the GNU Make manual.
include makext.mk
help: .help
build-app: clean-cache # Build the application
@echo "Building the application..."
clean-cache: # Clean the cache
@echo "Cleaning the cache..."
deploy-prod: # Deploy to production
@echo "Deploying to production..."
run-tests:
@echo "Running tests..."
This will give us the following result when we execute command make
without any arguments.
$ make
Targets:
build-app Build the application
clean-cache Clean the cache
deploy-prod Deploy to production
- Targets without defined comment next to the target will be ignored
from help list. In this case
run-tests
is missing from the list. - Targets that start with
.
will also be ignored. - Prerequisites in targets will be omitted from the result. See how
clean-cache
is missing frombuild-app
target.
You can provide description for the project that will be displayed
together with help
. To do this provide this information in the
MEX_DESCRIPTION
variable.
Same goes for license information. Provide this information by creating
MEX_LICENSE
variable.
If these variables are not present this information will not be displayed in the help.
Description and license information is also formatted to max 75 characters per row.
Important
Variables MEX_DESCRIPTION
and MEX_LICENSE
must be defined before you
include makext.mk
to your Makefile
. This is needed because the way
GNU Make is parsing Makefiles.
MEX_DESCRIPTION="This provides some additional tools for this project."
MEX_LICENSE="Released under the BSD two-clause license, see the LICENSE file for more information."
include makext.mk
help: .help
build-app: clean-cache # Build the application
@echo "Building the application..."
clean-cache: # Clean the cache
@echo "Cleaning the cache..."
The following example will produce the following result.
$ make
This provides some additional tools for this project.
Targets:
build-app Build the application
clean-cache Clean the cache
Released under the BSD two-clause license, see the LICENSE file for
more information.
Often times project uses multiple programs and to ensure that these
programs are already installed before recipes are executed .assure
can
be used. If programs are missing recipes can only partially be executed
leaving project in a potentially broken state.
MEX_ASSURE="python3 ls tree clang"
include makext.mk
build-app: .assure
@echo "Building the application..."
.assure
prerequisite will loop over the list of programs defined in
MEX_ASSURE
variable and in case one is missing will exit make
with
error status code 1. This will stop executing the recipe and therefore
not execute anything in target build-app
.
This extension helps loading of additional environmental files in your project. The files should have environmental variables defined in the usual way. Separate each file by a space and that is about it.
If a file is missing this will break the execution of make and exit with status code 1.
API_KEY=abc123
SECRET_KEY=def456
By defining MEX_ENVIRONMENT
variable you can provide additional files
and they will be loaded automatically.
MEX_ENVIRONMENT="local.env second.env"
include makext.mk
demo-envars:
@echo "Environment variables"
@echo " HOME: $(HOME)"
@echo " TERM: $(TERM)"
@echo " ENV: $(MEX_ENVIRONMENT)"
@echo " AUDIO_BUCKET: $(AUDIO_BUCKET)"
@echo " DB_HOST: $(DB_HOST)"
After that they can be used in your recipes like all the other variables you have. They will however override variables the shell already has defined.
- https://github.com/casey/just
- https://github.com/ruby/rake
- https://github.com/taskctl/taskctl
- https://github.com/go-task/task
- https://github.com/pydoit/doit
makext was written by Mitja Felicijan and is released under the BSD two-clause license, see the LICENSE file for more information.