The Case for Makefiles
I like Makefiles. Perhaps you should too. Here’s a use case.
My local website test is the ugly bundle exec jekyll serve -P 4001
. Publishing is uglier.
There’s a simple portable way. Use a Makefile.
The local test is reduced to make
or make serve
.
Publishing is reduced to make publish
.
“Chris, that adds a dependency of make!”
It does not. Jekyll’s best practice is to use a Gemfile and bundle. And a Jekyll dependency requires ‘make’ to install.
“Chris, there has to be a catch!”
Makefiles are a user-hostile format. 8 spaces is a different meaning than a tab character. They look the same in most editor defaults. They are terse.