Got make?

I'm @robashton

Things I don't like

AngularJS,Rails,Ruby,C#,Java,JavaScript,Ember,Node,Semicolons, Object orientated code, Design patterns, Procedural code, Imperative code, Dynamic languages, Bad coffee,Visual Studio,Emacs, Making slide decks, MacOS,Wearing clothes,Wearing shoes,Exercise,Software development

Things I do like

???

Make (GNU)

Make

• As old as the hills
• Full of weirdness
• FUN!

Demo

(Variable Expansion)

We learned

• Make is not procedural
• Recursive Variables are pretty lazy
• Simply expanded variables are not

Targets, Pre-reqs, Recipes

Demo

(A simple recipe)

We learned

• Targets are (usually) actual physical outputs
• Pre-requisites can be files or other targets
• Recipes are just scripts that do a->b

Pattern Rules

Demo

(Pattern rules)

We learned

• Pattern rules are just subsitutions with %
• Automatic variables are available to recipes
  • $@ = Filename of the target causing this to run
  • $< = Name of the first pre-requisite
  • $^ = All of the pre-requisites separated by spaces
  • .... a dozen more of these

Built in functions

Demo

(Wildcards)

We learned

• Lists of inputs can be generated with (wildcard  ...)
• Lists of outputs can be generated with (patsubst ...)
• Good when combined with pattern rules(!!)

Putting it all together

Demo

(Building the web)

We learned

• The structure of a Makefile
• Touching placeholder files
• Automatic parallelism! (on sensible OSs)

Things to consider

• Self executing make "per widget"
• Stylus dependencies (not dealt with in this example)
• Vanilla JS (existing JS files currently ignored)
• widgets -> node_modules 
• browserify/etc

Re-use

Demo

(Bootstrapping Makefile)

We learned

• wget is your friend
• Variable exports
• .DEFAULT_GOAL
• PROJECT CONVENTIONS FOR THE WIN

Don't do this

all: build-js build-css

build-js: 
  browserify -t brfs src/app.js > site/app.js

build-css:
  stylus src/style.styl > site/style.css

etc:
  blah


.PHONY build-js build-css etc

Build systems !== Task Runners

Did you mean...

npm scripts