LAMR

Ain't makefile replacement, but it might help you managing those.

Overview

LAMR is a simple tool to manage makefiles in such a way that generic rules are separated from project specific ones, and provides means to easily sync shared makefiles reducing duplication.

It should be especially useful if you have several projects using same languages/technologies, and want to provide automation for standard tasks like formatting, linting, deploying without duplicating lots of code.

Details

Projects using LAMR would basically have project-specific Makefile at project root, and one or more generic, shared makefiles hosted elsewhere in a separate repository. You could do this without using any tool, but it would be bothersome to manually keep those in sync with local changes and other projects.

This is where LAMR comes in. It allows for quick installation of your favorite Makefile rules, and helps in syncing changes to shared rules.

Design philosophy is to avoid reinventing the wheel, meaning that Makefiles are still just plain, old Makefiles, Git is used to manage shared files etc.

There's a sample repository with shared makefiles at https://github.com/edvardm/makefiles, but you probably want to create your own and point lamr to that instead.

Requirements

• Bash-compatible shell in a POSIX-compliant environment. At least Linux and MacOS should be fine
• Python >= 3.7 (3.x should be fine, but haven't tested)

Installation

In your project root directory, run

curl -ssL "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/edvardm/lamr/master/bootstrap.sh" -o lamr.sh
chmod +x lamr.sh && ./lamr.sh

If you have several developers in your project, you might want to add that script to version control, so that getting LAMR is as easy as running ./lamr.sh at project root.

Usage

lamr <cmd> where cmd is one of the following:

• install will add stub Makefile to your project, including shared .mk files

• pull will update local, shared makefiles by replacing any files that have more recent version in shared makefile repository

• push will push any modified .mk files to remote repository.

See lamr --help for more info.

Makefile repositories

In order to have those shared makefiles, you need to have a repository for those. There's only these few requirements you need to have so that LAMR is able to use that repository:

• Project root has subdirectory makefiles
• Makefiles should have .mk extension, named according to technology/feature

As an example, see https://github.com/edvardm/makefiles

Configuration

You can configure repository to use for Makefiles in an rc file. These files will be tried in order using the first found:

.lamrrc in current directory, $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/lamrrc and $HOME/.lamrrc.

For now, the only supported key is lamr.repository. Eg.

[lamr]
repository = edvardm/makefiles
# shortcut for git@github.com:edvardm/makefiles'

Development

Run make setup test, ensure all tests are green, and you're good to go.

FAQ

• Do I need to change my existing Makefiles? No, using include in your Makefile helps to adopt LAMR by separating more generic rules from project-specific
• Can I put other shared things there in addition to makefiles? LAMR would ignore those for now, but it's pretty much unaware of any make-specific things, so maybe in near future
• But I don't want to blindly push things to shared repo That's not a question. You can use git add --interactive though in a repository where you want pull changes to to cherry-pick only those changes you want. See next question too
• Can I make PRs to shared repositories instead of just pushing stuff there? Not yet through LAMR, but that might be useful feature later on
• Do I need remote repository for shared files? No, you can give --repo any URL to a repository you have at least read access to, including local repositories