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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

My favorite tool for remembering how to run something, or rather for not having to remember: A simple Makefile and a readme file.

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I've been using make to do this for ages, but its syntax really shows its age in a bad way. A while ago I switched to just (https://github.com/casey/just), which is a simple command runner with less unnecessary cruft (for my use case as a command runner) and a much saner syntax, and I've been pretty happy with it so far, I hardly ever need to look up anything.

There's also task (https://taskfile.dev/), which is YAML-based and might work well in an environment where everything else is YAML anyway, and makesure (https://github.com/xonixx/makesure), which is pretty similar to just, but didn't really click with me.

I also switched to just recently. Nice and simple syntax, and a very satisfying verb:

  just push
  just test

Regardless of the language I use for a project I always have these:

  - make test
  - make build (or run if it's an interactive app)
  - make publish

Publish runs test + build and uploads it to "production".

For Go projects I've started to move to Magefiles though: https://magefile.org

mage is great, I'm moving forward to that too.

I dont get mage, but i've been using makefiles for over 13 years.

I love go but the only example on the site is bad, and there is not any others. Also, executing commands in go is tedious and verbose w/o helpers. The "Why" on the page fails to convince me as well.

How is a makefile too much whitespace?

Is there any good examples of mage being used in a larger project? preferably a popular one?

If your makefile is mostly just simple single commands, there really is no point in moving to magefiles.

The test/lint/build phases of my magefiles are mostly the same as makefiles. What differs is the publish command:

There I can make use of (for example)native AWS libraries to do complex deployment processes with error checking and validation. All this is of course doable with makefiles, but it gets very tedious compared to a "real" programming language.

I grew frustrated with the compromises of makefiles for this and over the years I wrote a couple of alternatives, run_lib[1] and lk[2]. Now I write files full of the bash functions I need and use lk to explore and execute them. I.e. it's a consistent interface accross projects.

[1] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/lk

[2] https://github.com/jamescoleuk/run_lib

Same here, I have a makefile in every project.

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