lgarron / Makefile-scripts

🛠📜 Generate and maintain a `Makefile` based on scripts in `package.json`.

Makefile-scripts

Generate and maintain a Makefile based on scripts in package.json.

Usage

Install in your project and copy your scripts from package.json into Makefile:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lgarron/Makefile-scripts/master/Makefile > Makefile
make first-run

Now, you can run:

make build # invokes `npm run build`

Updating Makefile

If you add/remove/rename scripts in package.json, then run:

make update-Makefile

This is necessary because the script names from package.json are serialized into the Makefile to help shell autocompletion.

Dynamic Makefile

If you don't want to have to update your Makefile when you edit your set of scripts, copy dynamic.Makefile instead. Your commands will be a tad slower and shell autocompletion might not work, but the functionality should be the same.

Why?

I work on projects in a lot of different languages. I always include a Makefile because:

1. make is available on every platform I might use.
2. It works well enough for my use cases.
3. The syntax and semantics are likely to be stable long into the future.

Makefile-scripts allows me to use modern Javascript "best practices" by writing project scripts in package.json, but still run make without having to think about the context switch when I move between repositories in different languages.

Limitations

If you give your scripts names containing unusual characters (e.g. other than [A-Za-z0-9-_]), this might break the Makefile.