Intro

A Makefile comes from a C programming origin for compile C files in to binaries. You’ll still see it in modern C programs. If you ever used a Rakefile or NPM scripts, its a lot like that.

You need the make command installed. This comes by default when I use Linux and Mac systems.

In a project root you need a Makefile to exist. For Windows, this will be make.bat and has different syntax.

Run make and a TARGET (a command defined in Makefile).

Make and Jekyll

See my jekyll-blog-demo repo - a simple Jekyll blog quickstart.

This is what the Makefile looks like there:

  • Makefile 
      default: install

  help:
      @egrep '^\S|^$$' Makefile

  install:
      bundle config set --local path vendor/bundle
      bundle install

  upgrade:
      bundle update

  s serve:
      bundle exec jekyll serve --trace --livereload

And this is how to use it in the shell:

$ cd jekyll-blog-demo

$ make help

$ make install

$ make serve
$ # Same as above as I set `s` and `serve` to be equivalent
$ make s

You can also just run make and not arguments that will run the default target, which in this case is install. This is a C programming convention. Note that if you don’t set a default, then the target would be used. So I removed the default: line then make would run make help.

You can create a command with any “target” definition and multiple steps (see my install command).

I like to also set build commands.

$ make build-prod

That would map to this:

JEKYLL_ENVIRONMENT=prod bundle exec jekyll build --trace

Make and Python

You can also chain them together such that make fix effectively runs make format and then make lint. In this case, lint also calls linting targets defined higher up.

PyProject Template - Makefile

You can mostly think of it as a way of running shell commands with custom easy targets in a Makefile that is added to version control.

Make and CI

My Netlify build command then uses make build and my CI flow for GitHub actions also uses make commands.

PyProject Template - main.yml

Resources

I saved this section until the end, so you can focus on seeing make and Makefile in action in a Jekyll or Python project, before getting into the finer details.

  • Makefile on Wikipedia

    A makefile is a file containing a set of directives used by a make build automation tool to generate a target/goal.

Here is an overview of the syntax:

target … : prerequisites …
        recipe
        …
        …

Generally the target is not indented and steps inside a command are indented. Note that it uses tabs and not spaces.

That example comes from the GNU make docs. It is probably to heavy and detailed for beginners, but it is there in case you any official documentation.

This article is more beginner-friendly. It also goes into some specific examples around using make for a C project.

Advanced

There are some gotchas for advanced scripting for vars and conditionals, like $VARIABLE needs to be $$VARIABLE. But for basic uses you can do plenty without getting into that.

I wrote a Make cheatsheet for some of the more advanced syntax.