#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS UPDATE#
#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS MANUAL#
#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS CODE#
#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS WINDOWS#

This documentation describes the GNU implementation of make, which was written by Richard Stallman and Roland McGrath, and is currently maintained by Paul Smith. In a previous version of himself he wrote books on technology.Ĭontent is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.The purpose of the make utility is to determine automatically which pieces of a large program need to be re- compiled, and issue the commands necessary to recompile them. He is interested in people, music, food and writing. You can edit it here and send me a pull request.

#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS UPDATE#

Have an update or suggestion for this article? If you know a little UNIX maybe you should try make or a small bash script as your build tool. The main thing is to keep it small and distinct. If you can park the hipster hacker mentality there are tools that have been around for a long time that are stable and fast that already solve your problem. But sometimes the problem has already been solved by men with beards in the 1970’s. There is a tendency within any programming community to want to do everything in the community’s language. Bash - another optionįor a super lightweight build system you can also just craft your own bash scripts and ignore Make altogether. This is more of a cultural thing than anything to do with technology but if you are working in a team or accepting contributions to open source projects you might find people just refuse to use make.

#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS CODE#

I’ve seen developers shaking their head at Makefiles as soon as they see system commands or lines of code that don’t start with the word var.

GNU sed is different from BSD sed for example.Īnother weakness is that it is not JavaScript.

Some UNIX tools vary between platforms both in terms of where they are located and what they allow you to do. For node modules you can use npm to make sure a particular version is available but for UNIX tools you are on your own.

#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS MANUAL#

Managing dependencies is a manual process. Of course you can break tasks down to individual bash scripts that get called in the Makefile. Make can also become unmaintainable as it is just one big file.

#MAKEFILE VS RUNJS WINDOWS#

So if you have a windows developer in your team they will have to jump through some hoops to get it working. Probably the biggest weakness is that Make is not cross platform. If you can complete a task in five lines of code there is less to go wrong and it is easier to understand. In all tests I’ve run locally using system commands via a Makefile is always faster than using a build framework. In this sense it allows you to choose the best tool for the job and you can throw out the idea that you have to write everything in JavaScript. There is no need to create a wrapper or integrate with a build framework. A Makefile allows you to pick the best tool for the job. In this example I’m using the uglifyjs node module. Assuming you’ve concatenated your JavaScript files in the same way the css example did it becomes a one line command.

This will exclude any folder names prefixed with _. If you want to exclude files or folders you can do it like this build: -aq -exclude='_*'. It lets you synchronise folders on your own filesystem or even over the network. UNIX has many tools for copying files around the filesystem. We can extend the previous example to minify the CSS using the cssmin node module to minify the css too. UNIX tools already exist to make directories and combine files and they are fast because more often than not the underlying tools are C based. In the tradition of UNIX single line commands this is easy. Concatenating FilesĪ common build task is to concatenate various files into a single file. In the following examples it is assumed make build will be run from the terminal.

To use make you create a Makefile and then run make from the terminal. There is no doubt that tools like gulp and grunt are inpsired by or at least a reaction to make. It exposes any system command meaning that you can run system commands and execute arbitrary scripts. Loved by some, loathed by others it is at least worth being aware of how make works, what the strengths are and where it falls short. It existed a long time before gulp, or grunt. Last updated Saturday, Making the case for make Make gives you access to many tiny, powerful UNIX tools and shouldn't be overlooked as a build tool.Įstimated reading time: 4 minutes Table of contents

Makefile vs runjs