synmake

What is synmake?

You will not need synmake, when you have to write a simple Makefile but synmake should rather help you in times where you cannot remember, e.g. how to setup a preflight check for checking the minimum required version of a tool or how to print a help window that describes the available targets.

Nowadays, the majority of people are used to writing YAML. synmake allows you to write the specification in YAML and is doing the generation of the Makefile for you.

How to install synmake

You can install synmake with the following command:

go install github.com/RaphSku/synmake@latest

How to use synmake

To print synmake's version, use

synmake version

If you want to generate an example configuration YAML, simply run:

synmake generate config

Adjust it to your needs and then you can simply generate your Makefile via

synmake --config=<path/to/your/config.yaml>

The Makefile will be created in the directory in which you ran this command. If something goes wrong, you can enable debugging with

synmake --config=<path/to/your/config.yaml> --debug

Understanding the config schema

An example configuration file might look like this:

---
targets:
  targetA:
    helpDescription: targetA just prints an output
    commands:
      - echo "Hello World"
      - echo "This is how you specify commands!"
    display: false
  targetB:
    helpDescription: targetB just prints an output
    preTargets:
      - targetA
    commands:
      - echo "This is targetB!"
      - echo "How are you doing?"
    display: true
templates:
  helpTemplate:
    enabled: true
    delimiter: '##'
  versionTemplate:
    enabled: true
    library: example
    minVersion: 0.1.0

Targets

Each key under targets specifies a new target where you can specify 3 attributes:

• helpDescription -> This field describes the target and will be added above the target as documentation. If you have set helpTemplate.enabled to true, the helpTemplate.delimiter will override the default comment delimiter which is #.
• commands -> Here you can specify the commands that should be appear under the given target.
• display -> If display is true, the commands will be printed when you run the given target, otherwise they are supressed by the command modifier @.

Templates

Templates are additional helper targets that can be optionally added to the Makefile. Currently, 2 templates are available:

• helpTemplate -> It adds a help target to the Makefile, such that when you run make, a help description is shown with all the available targets and their help description.
• versionTemplate -> The version template can be used to check the version of a given tool, this is especially helpful for preflight checks before a given target is being run. versionTemplate.library specifies the tool and minVersion the minimum version that the tool has to satisfy.