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task.mk

help

the task runner for GNU Make you've been missing


GNU make is an excellent build tool and the task runner we love to hate, but can't escape. So let's improve the UX to make it the best task runner it can be.

Task.mk, is a standalone Makefile you can deploy alongside your own to add some QOL improvements for your users and fellow maintainers.

Current Features:

  • ANSI escape code support (including NO_COLOR)
  • formatted help output
  • custom print function
  • confirmation prompt

Depends on GNU Make, obviously and Python >=3.7, and bash (or zsh).

Wait python?!?!, I'm not pip installing some package just to parse my makefile. I agree, all you need is one file .task.mk. You can automagically include it with just two additional lines to your Makefile (and probably one to your .gitignore) and your good to go.

Setup

You can include this as an optional dependency on your project by adding the below lines to the end of your Makefile. If someone tries to invoke make help it will download .task.mk for them.

-include .task.mk
$(if $(filter help,$(MAKECMDGOALS)),$(if $(wildcard .task.mk),,.task.mk: ; curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daylinmorgan/task.mk/v22.9.19/task.mk -o .task.mk))

You might also consider making it a consistently downloaded dependency if you plan to use any of it's advanced feature set, by dropping the $(MAKECMDGOALS) check.

-include .task.mk
$(if $(wildcard .task.mk),,.task.mk: ; curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/daylinmorgan/task.mk/v22.9.19/task.mk -o .task.mk)

Alternatively, you can use the builtin rule _update-task.mk to update to the latest development version.

See Usage to get started running all your tasks. See Examples for more use cases.

Zsh Completions for GNU Make

If you use GNU Make with zsh you may want to add the following line to your rc file to allow make to handle the autocomplete.

zstyle ':completion::complete:make:*:targets' call-command true

Why Make?

There are lot of GNU Make alternatives but none have near the same level of ubiquity. This project attaches to make some of the native features of just, a command runner.

Just is a great task runner, but it suffers two problems, users probably don't have it installed already, and there is no way to define file specific recipes. Most of my Makefile's are comprised primarily of handy .PHONY recipes, but I always end up with a few file specific recipes.

Another interesting project I've evaluated for these purposes is go-task/task. Task has many of the features of GNU Make and some novel features of it's own. But like just it's a tool people don't usually already have and it's configured using a yaml file. Yaml files can be finicky to work with and and it uses a golang based shell runtime, not your native shell, which might lead to unexpected behavior.

Simpler Alternative

But I just want a basic help output, surely I don't need python for this... you would be right. Task.mk replaces my old make help recipe boilerplate which may better serve you (so long as you have sed/awk).

## h, help | show this help
.PHONY: help h
help h: Makefile
	@awk -v fill=$(shell sed -n 's/^## \(.*\) | .*/\1/p' $< | wc -L)\
		'match($$0,/^## (.*) \|/,name) && match($$0,/\| (.*)$$/,help)\
		{printf "\033[1;93m%*s\033[0m | \033[30m%s\033[0m\n",\
		fill,name[1],help[1];} match($$0,/^### (.*)/,str) \
		{printf "%*s   \033[30m%s\033[0m\n",fill," ",str[1];}' $<