Makefiles rock

Recently I’ve been working on a couple of projects that require somewhat longer commands to be run for testing or that require a lot of different shorter commands to be run. It has been a long time since I was introduced to make and I am no guru but make makes it really easy to keep some versioned commands and hints around. For example, in my tiny chat server stomp-chat (made to test one of my other projects, a message broker), it is hardcoded to expect certain behavior from the server. That is most easily done with a docker run command with several -e flags. But now

I can just make run-server and voila. And all it took was this:

run-server:
	docker run -d -p 32801:32801 \
		-e STOMPER_HOSTNAME=0.0.0.0 \
		-e STOMPER_TOPICS=/channel/main \
		-e STOMPER_TCPDEADLINE=0 \
	ghcr.io/tydar/stomper:main

Similarly, I’ve been learning some MongoDB basics for a project at work and I created a rudimentary static site generator that pulls content from a local mongo instance. Here’s the Makefile I use to make sure I never have to fumble when I take a spareminute to work on the project:

run-mongo:
	docker run -d -p 27017:27017 --name mongo_test mongo:latest

stop-mongo:
	docker stop mongo_test

build:
	go build .

build-site: 
	./mdbssg

run-site:
	docker build -t mdbssg-test . && docker run --name mdbssg_test -d -p 8080:80 mdbssg-test

stop-site:
	docker stop mdbssg_test && docker container rm mdbssg_test

It saved me a ton of time especially to write out those short lines for run-site and stop-site. A lot has changed about that project since I started it, so this particular Makefile isn’t in use, but it really helped finish my first iteration quickly without too much fussing over docker commands or wasted time when I’d forget to rm a container before running a new one.

I know there’s a lot more that can be done with make, but even this simple use is great for quickly getting things done!

Tags: make linux