Building Web Applications with Make

(full disclosure: I'm the maker of make)

make might not be the beauty in your cheerleader team of build tools, but it gets things actually done - that's what it was made for ... it's for devs who want to make things - hence its choice of name!

I like to write debuggable Node.js programs for very complicated builds and rely on npm scripts for simpler build systems. It works good for me. Gulp is also great since it's very debuggable.

Make has a branding problem. Most people consider it a build tool for C programs when it's actually a declarative language for defining relationships between files. It's been a viable tool for decades (talk about a mature product!) because of its power and flexibility. And no build tool matches its wonderful accessibility, since you can just drop arbitrary shell commands in your recipes.

Make has a templating system, e.g. to generate .html file automatically from .t fragments. My Make_HERE_CMS is based on Make and here Scripts.

Look at: http://kephra.de/blog/Make_here_CMS.html

oh well I should really document the xslt part for the left side picture gallery of my site.

Just a bit of devils advocacy here...

"Chances are, most computers you log in to will already have it installed and available to use."

To the best of my knowledge, Make isn't included in OSX. While it can be easily via Xcode, lacking this utility can be frustrating to beginners who simply download Node and want to build a project.

I use a Makefile to generate my blog: https://github.com/kaihendry/natalian/blob/mk/Makefile

Make existed, people didn't like it, they came up with different build tools, now those tools are too numerous and too specific, now make doesn't look too bad! Full circle indeed.

Thanks for sharing this. This article was really helpful to a newb like myself and explained things a lot of articles like this skip over (like the '-' in the cat command).

I object.

Why is this website being tricky about letting me select text? Some invisible overlay it seems. I'll just have Firebug delete a few elements and be happy.

> GNU Make 3.81

My god. What kind of ancient system is that? I didn't even Debian was that outdated.

Why is it a surprise that make is good for controlling file transformations? Other than that it reads like a good introduction to make.