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nik
Asked: 2009-06-25 08:38:58 +0800 CST

What have you used Makefiles for (besides build automation)

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Makefiles are great for automating builds, installs and tests.

But, that is not the end of Make. I have used makefiles to do many tasks like cleaning up logs, keeping mirrored web pages and downloads, hooked them into crontabs and test suites...

Like scripting, I think there is a large scope of automating with Makefiles. Particularly when you have a chain of dependency based triggering required.

What different things have you done using Makefiles?
What are you planning to do more with them, on a rainy day perhaps.

linux scripting automation

8 Answers

  1. My resume. LaTeX input, PDF output.

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  2. I like Makefiles very much, especially for junior sysadmins.

    Update the bind zonefile?

    No problem: target has checkzone and checkconfig (out of memory) and only does sudo cp <editlocation> <reallocation>; git commit -a .... if everything seems basically fine...

    Complex deployment?

    No problem record it in a Makefile

    I've pretty much used Makefiles anywhere where a script would have been appropriate also. Acutally I combine them, /usr/local/[s]bin/ is where the "single step" scripts are and the Makefile is in the working directory of the service in question.

    Actually I have used them a lot more for the above reasons than for build systems - that is if you don't count latex and builds from upstream.

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  3. Since we're pretty much a Ruby shop, I use Rake instead of Make. I've automated the following with Rake, and it shouldn't be too difficult to do these with Make:

    EC2 node maintenance. Create and terminate instances.

    Create a tarball and upload it to S3.

    Deploy server configurations; mainly by calling rsync for directories and directly copying singleton files.

    Convert Ruby DSL code into JSON data.

    Handle software releases in a git repository (creating new branches, tags, etc).

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  4. sendmail.cf back in the 8.9 days if I recall.

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  5. I used makefiles to handle XML transformation from DocBook sources. That way I could pipeline all of the commands and do "make pdf" or "make wordml" from the same source depending on who the intended audience was.

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  6. Nothing really. I find Makefile syntax to be horrible for most day-to-day tasks and I try to only interact with Makefiles when absolutely necessary. For system administration tasks, I don't see what they offer over a Bash or Python script. For building software, there are better build systems out there.

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  7. I've used it to "print all notes since last printing" in a random notes directory:

    printflag: *.txt
    printcmd $?
    echo "printcmd $?" > $@

    I echoed the command into the flag file so I could just ". printflag" to reprint the same set if need be;

    to maintain DNS / DHCP / etc. :

    edit hosts.dat # maintain single file with all relevant info
make           # work copies for visual check, diffs, etc., if needed
make install   # put into deploy-from-here location
make deploy    # push changed files to servers
make restart   # restart appropriate server processes here and there

    (or just "edit hosts.dat; make restart" for the foolishly brave)

    and as a quick and dirty way to generate manual scripts for procedures -- that is, just use pseudo targets and have the makefile commands echo something along the lines of "do step Foo" -- when you need something more sophisticated than tsort

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  8. I know some people used to use Makefile script instead of init scripts. This effectively made them run paralelly and define dependencies between steps.

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