Add a help target to a Makefile that will allow all targets to be self documenting
This file contains bidirectional Unicode text that may be interpreted or compiled differently than what appears below. To review, open the file in an editor that reveals hidden Unicode characters.
Learn more about bidirectional Unicode characters
# Add the following 'help' target to your Makefile | |
# And add help text after each target name starting with '\#\#' | |
help: ## Show this help. | |
@fgrep -h "##" $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | fgrep -v fgrep | sed -e 's/\\$$//' | sed -e 's/##//' | |
# Everything below is an example | |
target00: ## This message will show up when typing 'make help' | |
@echo does nothing | |
target01: ## This message will also show up when typing 'make help' | |
@echo does something | |
# Remember that targets can have multiple entries (if your target specifications are very long, etc.) | |
target02: ## This message will show up too!!! | |
target02: target00 target01 | |
@echo does even more |
@arvenil A bit of golfing and I got this to sort of work with the only deps being GNU make
and bash
SHELL:=/bin/bash
.PHONY: help help_target-funky+names.0k and_with_2_targets_and_spaces_like_bison
help_target-funky+names.0k and_with_2_targets_and_spaces_like_bison: ## Funky ones & bison dual target display ok
echo "bad - why are you not displaying?"
help: ## bash help
help: ## moar bash help
@RE='^[a-zA-Z0-9 ._+-]*:[a-zA-Z0-9 ._+-]*##' ; while read line ; do [[ "$$line" =~ $$RE ]] && echo "$$line" ; done <$(MAKEFILE_LIST) ; RE=''
Which for make help
outputs
$ make help
help_target-funky+names.0k and_with_2_targets_and_spaces_like_bison: ## Funky ones & bison dual target display ok
help: ## bash help
help: ## moar bash help
Sign up for free
to join this conversation on GitHub.
Already have an account?
Sign in to comment
One other note, since GNU Make is the most popular, it has a fairly powerful and underutilized optional integration of GNU Guile. GNU Guile is language in the Scheme & Lisp family of languages.
If Guile is a bridge too far, then consider bash's BASH_REMATCH facility.
It'll be a bit more code (file I/O, regexes, file parsing, etc) and you'll have to maintain it rather than depending on other well tested tooling like awk, sed, grep.