What have you used Makefiles for (besides build automation)

Question

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.

Answer 1

My resume. LaTeX input, PDF output.

Answer 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.

Answer 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).

Answer 4

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

Answer 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.

Answer 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.

Answer 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

Answer 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.