help-make-helper

A small python program you put in your Makefile to produce fancy help NOTE: in case you wonder, where the Python program is: it's inside the Makefile. This program is meant to run when you run the command make.

Motivation

Building modern software requires a lot of tools. I can't and I don't want to memorize or type all these commands over and over again (docker, npm, terraform, ansible, scss, etc). What ever your stack looks like, Makefile and the make command help you avoid unnecessary typing and save time.

If you have a CI\CD pipeline this also help abstract all the stages and allows you to run all the test, build and deploy phases locally.

Just type make after cloning this repo! It will print:

$ make
Targets:

test                 test that the HOST shows background COLOR

  HOST - what host is running NGinx
  COLOR - which color should be the backround

docker-build         build a docker image


docker-push          push docker image to $(REGISTRY)


Global Variables you can override:

VERSION              version
REGISTRY             container registry to push
ORG                  organization to push to
IMG                  image name
OPTS                 add extra OPTS to misc commands

This make file parses all the lines and checks for target, local variables and global variables. If they are suffixed with ## or #? the string that follows is interpreted as the help for that variable or target. This is much better then maintaining a help target manually for larger projects.

The targets can be used with parameters like this:

make docker-build IMG=foo TAG=0.1

Or:

make test COLOR=red HOST=red.example.org