I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles

• just

  167 17,513 9.0 Rust

  🤖 Just a command runner

I don't like makefiles, but I've been enjoying justfiles: https://github.com/casey/just

• .files

  4 4 9.0 Shell

  No place like ~ (by matheusmoreira)

I (ab)use make to manage my dotfiles.

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/GNUmake...

I'm surprised at how well this thing works every time I use it. I even blogged about it.

https://www.matheusmoreira.com/articles/managing-dotfiles-wi...

Recently made a tool that processes the make database and prints the phony targets and their dependencies:

https://github.com/matheusmoreira/.files/blob/master/~/.loca...

I use it as a sort of makefile help command. Works surprisingly well too.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• just-flake

  1 15 5.4 Nix

  Use `just` in your Nix devShells with re-usable and share-able targets.

  

I've been using this on almost all of my projects, and am really pleased with it. Shell autocompletion is a nice bonus. If you also Nix, checkout `just-flake`:

https://github.com/juspay/just-flake

• makesure

  13 330 9.2 Shell

  Simple task/command runner with declarative goals and dependencies

• macos-cross-compiler

  4 324 8.8 Earthly

  Compile binaries for macOS on Linux

Make is excellent if you use it properly to model your dependencies. This works really well for languages like C/C++, but I think Make really struggles with languages like Go, JavaScript, and Python or when your using a large combination of technologies.

I've found Earthly [0] to be the _perfect_ tool to replace Make. It's a familiar syntax (combination of Dockerfiles + Makefiles). Every target is run in an isolated Docker container, and each target can copy files from other targets. This allows Earthly to perform caching and parallelization for free, and in addition you get lots of safety with containerization. I've been using Earthly for a couple of years now and I love it.

Some things I've built with it:

* At work [1], we use it to build Docker images for E2E testing. This includes building a Go project, our mkdocs documentation, our Vue UI, and a ton of little scripts all over the place for generating documentation, release notes, dependency information (like the licenses of our deps), etc.

* I used it to create my macOS cross compiler project [2].

* A project for playing a collaborative game of Pokemon on Discord [3]

IMO Makefiles are great if you have a few small targets. If you're looking at more than >50 lines, if your project uses many languages, or you need to run targets in a Docker container, then Earthly is a great choice.

[0]: https://earthly.dev/

[1]: https://p3m.dev/

[2]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/macos-cross-compiler

[3]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/discord-plays-pokemon

• discord-plays-pokemon

  1 3 7.7 TypeScript

  Twitch Plays Pokémon, but for Discord (by shepherdjerred)

Make is excellent if you use it properly to model your dependencies. This works really well for languages like C/C++, but I think Make really struggles with languages like Go, JavaScript, and Python or when your using a large combination of technologies.

I've found Earthly [0] to be the _perfect_ tool to replace Make. It's a familiar syntax (combination of Dockerfiles + Makefiles). Every target is run in an isolated Docker container, and each target can copy files from other targets. This allows Earthly to perform caching and parallelization for free, and in addition you get lots of safety with containerization. I've been using Earthly for a couple of years now and I love it.

Some things I've built with it:

* At work [1], we use it to build Docker images for E2E testing. This includes building a Go project, our mkdocs documentation, our Vue UI, and a ton of little scripts all over the place for generating documentation, release notes, dependency information (like the licenses of our deps), etc.

* I used it to create my macOS cross compiler project [2].

* A project for playing a collaborative game of Pokemon on Discord [3]

IMO Makefiles are great if you have a few small targets. If you're looking at more than >50 lines, if your project uses many languages, or you need to run targets in a Docker container, then Earthly is a great choice.

[0]: https://earthly.dev/

[1]: https://p3m.dev/

[2]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/macos-cross-compiler

[3]: https://github.com/shepherdjerred/discord-plays-pokemon

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