Make and Makefiles

What is Make

make is a tool that helps automate the build of software. It allows you to provide aliases to execute various steps in a build workflow, and it also lets you specify dependencies between steps.

Makefiles

Makefiles contains sets of instructions that define targets, dependencies, and commands executed by make.

For example, a Go Makefile might look like this (taken from my FlexCreek app):

.PHONY: build-app run clean
 
build-app:
    go build -o bin/flexcreek ./cmd/flexcreek.go 
 
run: build-app
    @./bin/flexcreek
 
clean:
    @rm -rf bin

In the first line, .PHONY declares targets that aren’t files.

The lines after that define targets, dependencies, and commands. So, for instance, the run line defines run as a target/step, build-app as a dependency for run (i.e. the app needs to be built before it can run), and @./bin/flexcreek is the command to run (i.e. run the flexcreek executable in /bin).