Dutch developer Zef Hemel advises wisely:
“go and build amazing applications. Build them with the most boring technology you can find. The stuff that has been in use for years and years.”
While it’s arguable, if make is “boring,” it fulfills the second statement
very good: It’s in use for nearly 35 years now.
There is a lot of buzz on the front of automated build systems. Apache Ant is
a grandfather yet, Rake tries to mimic make in
Ruby and Grunt just recently jumped up to get its share
in the JS community. While all of these tools have their advantages and rights
on their own, the good old make is not only sufficient for most jobs, it
has also the highest chance to be available on your backend guys’ machines.
There are several Makefiles that all provide different functionality. For
example, if you want to validate HTML files in your project, include the
tidy.mk file like this in your main Makefile:
HTML_TARGETS := $(shell find . -type f -name \*.html)
test: test-tidy
include make-web/tidy.mk
Then you can run
$ make build-tidy
to get the tidy program, and
$ make test
to see instantly the validation results.
This file serves as general purpose dummy. It’s main purpose is to allow you to do
include make-web/*
in your Makefile and to utter a warning, if you do this before any of your own targets, thus setting the default target.
These are CSS related targets. Set CSS_SRC to a list of CSS files, and the
target css will grab them and minify them using
cssmin.
This Makefile contains targets to optimize PNG, JPEG and GIF images.
Build, concatenate and minify JavaScript files with this Makefile. There is support for Bower and RequireJS built right in.
Handle PHP dependencies with Composer or test PHP
files for syntax errors. You can run PHPUnit unit tests by specifying the unit
test entry in $(PHP_PHPUNIT_ENTRY).
Compile Sass files to CSS. You can set the output style with $(SASS_STYLE).
Add SASS_USE_COMPASS = 1 to switch to the
Compass framework.
Validate HTML files. This Makefile fetches the HTML5-enabled Tidy from Github.
Watch directories for changes and automatically start other make targets, if a file is modified.
If you want to start with make, take a look at
the Wikipedia article.
From there you should jump directly to the well-written
GNU make manual. There
is a WikiBook dedicated to make.
The Makefiles are put in the public domain. If this concept is not applicable in your country, the license is CC0. Please note, that the files may load other software, that is distributed under different licenses. It’s your responsibility to adhere to them.
These Makefiles were written by Manuel Strehl