The secret is out, I really like a good Makefile!
Ever since college, I had only ever heard of how terrible Makefiles are, so
I have always avoided them. The Symfony project thought at one point that
they would shift to using make. When that happened, I thought that
I better learn how to use it. After researching and trying it out,
I really started to like make. There’s a learning curve, but great payoff.
I noticed some key things about my projects that were converted to using a
Makefile:
- Reduction in documentation. A lot of “How do I…?” get answered by
running
make target. - Random Bash scripts were deleted and migrated to the
Makefile, often improving. I’m not a Bash Wizard, so this is a good thing. - Standardizes project tasks for everyone.
Now with make, I am automating all the things and writing less documentation.
Win win for me. Another great thing about make is that it is usually already
installed. This means that most people do not have to install something in order
use your automation tool of choice (EG: it’s as convenient as Bash scripts).
Some other things I like about make:
- Error handling. If a command fails, it bails.
- Being able to conditionally control the printing of the command being
executed via prefixing
@. - Targets and their dependencies. Makes it really easy to organize and ensure everything happens in the correct order.
Symfony ended up not using make, but I was already hooked.