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A sensational description would say, "Give a Makefile super powers!" but that would be too much. There is already a project to provide a standard library for GNU Make (GMSL), and this Makefile.d project does not provide a standard library. Besides, a simple Makefile is already powerful; the work is to keep it simple.

The Makefile.d project provides a readily installable directory of .mk files which together provide a programming environment for multiple runtimes.

Here, "multiple runtimes" indicates a project which has more than one programming language, or which embeds/integrates one or more externally developed services. Treating GNU Make as a dependency-driven shell environment, it is possible to create single-command builds which download and configure various tools and services in place, then fork multiple processes for development to integrate these together.

Example use cases include:

• Manage vendor applications inside a monorepo, without checking in code from those projects.
• Load a Python environment with third-party packages using only python3 and a Makefile. This is particularly useful for projects which are small, use Python to develop supporting tools in non-Python projects, or otherwise cannot reliably assume the developer has the latest Python tools installed.
• Integrating open-source services by running a reliable development environment of those services entirely in one command.

Each example use case is possible with a single make invocation on a newly cloned project. The goal is to provide repeatable builds without assuming the developer has every tool already installed. (At the very least, a failed build can indicate which programs are missing.)

Download .Makefile.d-init.mk to the project root:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://qwerty.sh | sh -s - \
    https://github.com/rduplain/Makefile.d.git .Makefile.d-init.mk

Include this .mk in the project Makefile, then include any .Makefile.d file:

include .Makefile.d-init.mk
include .Makefile.d/path.mk

That's it. Add .Makefile.d to .gitignore or equivalent. By default, .Makefile.d-init.mk downloads a fixed revision of Makefile.d. Select a different version by editing MAKEFILE_D_REV in the .Makefile.d-init.mk file. The project Makefile will re-download the local .Makefile.d installation automatically.

The Makefile.d project's 'master' branch is stable.

Add include statements to the project's Makefile, e.g.:

include .Makefile.d/path.mk

Use variables and recipe patterns respective to included files. See test/python/Makefile and test/cljs/Makefile for example usage.

Makefile.d .mk files that install project-local software use a convention of a hidden dotfile directory at the project root, .reqd, under which a Unix-familiar hierarchy applies:

• .reqd/src - Source code, typically to prepare installation to a bin.
• .reqd/usr/bin - Stand-alone executables.
• .reqd/opt/<package>/bin - Executables in package-specific directories.

By convention, project-local tools are available in Makefile variables. For example, python.mk sets $(PYTHON) to the path of the python command inside the newly configured virtualenv. Use of these variables ensures that make invocation finds the correct installation of Makefile.d-installed dependencies, without requiring any modifications to environment variable paths.

Further convention has Makefile.d .mk files issue export statements for environment variables, typically PATH, in order to have any command executed by make be able to find the project-local paths.

To start an interactive shell in a configured environment, add a target to the Makefile such as:

shell:
	@bash

Unfortunately, make overrides the conventional Unix environment variable SHELL, so this shell target needs to read some other user configuration or pick a shell (bash, zsh, ...) for the purpose of the project.

Another approach for an interactive shell is to start a new shell in the project root directory, and have the profile/rc configuration add project-local paths to relevant environment variables. For example, start bash in the project root -- a common occurrence with terminal multiplexers such as screen and tmux -- and have .bashrc include:

export PATH="$PWD"/.reqd/usr/bin:"$PATH"

for dir in "$PWD"/.reqd/opt/*/bin; do
    export PATH="$dir":"$PATH"
done

Additional variables may be needed, such as GEM_HOME in ruby.mk:

if [ -e "$PWD"/.reqd/opt/ruby ]; then
    export GEM_HOME="$PWD"/.reqd/opt/ruby
fi

In general, using this approach, look for export statements in .mk files and port them to shell configuration.

This project is cross-platform for Unix systems -- GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, ... -- as long as the Makefile is being run by GNU Make 3.81+, where 3.81 has a release date in 2006. Specifically, these includes are not portable to non-GNU implementations of Make (e.g. BSD Make) given dynamic features in use.

Run tests:

./test/bin/test-suite

Makefile.d commonly downloads files to integrate dependencies, always using a checksum or git to verify the download. Makefile.d uses qwerty.sh to reliably download, verify, and unpack dependencies, which is a script-as-a-service available at https://qwerty.sh providing the latest version of qwerty.sh by default.

To change this behavior, set the QWERTY_SH_URL environment variable to an alternate download or QWERTY_SH to a local filepath, using one of the following patterns:

QWERTY_SH_URL="https://qwerty.sh"
QWERTY_SH_URL="https://qwerty.sh/v0.6"
QWERTY_SH_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rduplain/qwerty.sh/master/qwerty.sh"
QWERTY_SH_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rduplain/qwerty.sh/v0.6/qwerty.sh"
QWERTY_SH="sh /path/to/qwerty.sh"
QWERTY_SH="/path/to/qwerty.sh"

When setting QWERTY_SH to a local filepath:

• Download qwerty.sh from https://qwerty.sh, which is always the latest release of qwerty.sh. Optionally include a version, e.g. https://qwerty.sh/v0.6.
• ... or from GitHub through its "raw" file hosting; use a version tag by changing master in the URL to a version tag, e.g. v0.6.
  • Recommended: use a version tag, e.g. v0.6. Though master is stable, it consistently refers to a pre-release; prefer a release version when downloading qwerty.sh.
• Ensure that the resulting file is executable: chmod a+x /path/to/qwerty.sh.
• Specify the absolute path to qwerty.sh.

Copyright (c) 2015-2021, R. DuPlain. BSD licensed.