I built this guide because I could never quite wrap my head around Makefiles. They seemed awash with hidden rules and esoteric symbols, and asking simple questions didn’t yield simple answers. To solve this, I sat down for several weekends and read everything I could about Makefiles. I've condensed the most critical knowledge into this guide. Each topic has a brief description and a self contained example that you can run yourself.
If you mostly understand Make, consider checking out the Makefile Cookbook, which has a template for medium sized projects with ample comments about what each part of the Makefile is doing.

This is the official Task styleguide for Taskfile.yml files.

Task is a task runner / build tool that aims to be simpler and easier to use than, for example, GNU Make.

Since it's written in Go, Task is just a single binary and has no other dependencies, which means you don't need to mess with any complicated install setups just to use a build tool.

Phony Targets (GNU make)

How to develop a Makefile

They key to successfully writing a Makefile is to just write down the commands you need at the moment. Ran a new command? Put it in the Makefile. Over time, the Makefile will grow to include even those rare commands you rarely run and can’t remember what they were. Patters with emerge, and these will help guide the prerequisites that may otherwise not be obvious.

Not everyone is aware that make can easily be used to manage tasks in your projects. In this article, I’d like to share a brief introduction to how Makefiles help me automate some tasks in my day to day activities. This brief guide will focus on using make as an automation tool for tasks rather than a tool for compiling code.

But there is a good standard UNIX tool. By standard I mean it actually has robust documentation, that many forgot. Or never learned? I’m talking about make. More accurately, this article focuses on GNU make. It’s available on macOS, Windows, Linux and most other operating systems.

If you want to run or update a task when certain files are updated, the make utility can come in handy. The make utility requires a file, Makefile (or makefile), which defines set of tasks to be executed. You may have used make to compile a program from source code. Most open source projects use make to compile a final executable binary, which can then be installed using make install.