Supermake

Supermake is an alternative to Make, the popular build automation tool. It offers builtin parallelism and container support, all using the a Makefile-like format developers know and love.

Note

Supermake is very much still in-development. It has not yet reached feature-parity. Bugs are to be expected.

Contributions in the form of PR's, documentation improvements, bug reports and feature requests are all welcome.

Features 💡

1. Automatic parallelisation of targets whenever possible, increasing speed by utilizing all CPU cores.
2. Allows nested targets, increasing readability.
3. Run (part of) your recipes in different shells, interpreters and even containers 🐳.
4. Make-like syntax. Re-purpose your Makefiles with a few tweaks.

Roadmap 🗺️

• Parametrized targets. Like build_container(stage):
• Supermake directory trees. Automatically run matching targets of Supermake files in subdirectories.

Installation

Grab a pre-built executable from the latest release or build it yourself.

git clone git@github.com:KillianMeersman/Supermake.git
cd Supermake
make install

Usage

Once installed, it's as simple as running

smake run <target>

If you want to find out more, you can use the help command and/or flag.

smake help
smake run --help

Example

TAG ?= latest  # Inherit from environment variable, using 'latest' as fallback
BASE_IMAGE = ghcr.io/killianmeersman/supermake/example/base:${{ TAG }}
CI_IMAGE = ghcr.io/killianmeersman/supermake/example/ci${{ TAG }}

build:  # build will run both the base and ci target
	base:
		docker build --target base -t ${{ BASE_IMAGE }}

	ci: base  # ci will wait until base is done
		docker build --target ci -t ${{ CI_IMAGE }}


test: build::ci  # Wait until the ci subtarget is done, both subtargets will run in parallel
	test_module_a:
		@python:3.11  # Will run inside the python:3.11 image, with the current directory mounted inside
		pytest a/
	
	test_module_b:
		@${{ CI_IMAGE }}  # Will run inside the newly built ci image, with the current directory mounted inside
		pytest b/

Differences with Make ⚠️

• Supermake has no conditional syntax (yet).
• Every Supermake recipe runs in the same shell, making .ONESHELL redundant. Make will, by default, run every recipe line in a new shell, .
• Supermake uses ${{ IDENTIFIER }} variable notation (spaces are optional), instead of Make's $(IDENTIFIER) notation.

Further reading

Check out out the user guide for a quickstart or the docs for a deep-dive into Supermake.