What's a Makefile for?

As our software projects grow, it quickly becomes hard to remember every command you can run.

For example, a basic web project usually has commands for:

• Running a dev version
• Generating a build
• Compiling assets or static files
• Running docker containers
• Running tests
• Etc.

A fairly basic solution would be creating a README.md at the project root listing the commands — very simple to do, and it works! Yes, but I’m a web developer, and I’m lazy! 😔

A slightly more technical solution would be writing small scripts to run our commands, but again that’s not necessarily a great fit.

Imagine creating a bash file just to run a docker compose up -d — feels slightly overkill, right?

The solution to all our problems is Makefile!

That’s all well and good, but what does it actually look like?
Let’s take the Makefile from my project MyLinks as an example.

db:
	docker compose -f dev.docker-compose.yml up -d

dev:
	npm run dev

prod:
	docker compose up -d --build

also worth checking out: just