This is the summary of my experience applied to programming in C. My ambition is to put together all good practices and necessary features of a well-driven C project. I would like to include good compilation, sub-projects, static analyzers, and testing processes.
I want this makefile to be easy to use, easy to get started with and well-documented.
I have worked on this project on and off multiple times. Today, I don't code in C anymore, so I want to share the current state of this project. The initial goal of this project was very ambitious, and I let anyone use this Makefile if he/she finds it useful.
The ultimate makefile must be intuitive, simple, configurable, easy to understand and finally and most importantlty practical.
Basically you can copy/paste the whole content of the makefile into your project. You can then use make init in order to have a minimal viable project. This will create the minimal file you need in order to start your project.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FauconFan/makefileC/master/Makefile -o Makefile
make init- Support basic rules:
makeormake all: build the binarymake clean: remove all binaries and generated files except the binarymake fclean: remove all binaries and generated filesmake re: shortcut formake fclean && make all
- Debug mode
make debugandmake redebug - Help command
make help - Init command
make init(when starting a new project only) - Verbose mode with VERBOSE=1
make VERBOSE=1 [target](prints out meaningful commands) - Compile or recompile only if necessary (source files as well as header files)
- If no file needs to be recompiled, nothing is done (no relink)
- Progress status during (re)compiling (per file)
- Multithread support (native makefile feature)
- Out-of-source builds (the source and header directory is not altered in any way)
- Configuration through a config file
config.mk- Specify names of final binaries (release and debug)
- Change compiler and flags (warnings, optimization, debug, standard, etc...)
- Specify source, build, and include directories names
- List all source files
- Error handling
- The
config.mkfile is missing - Missing variables
- Unauthorized variables are defined
- Specified files are missing
- Presence of unspecified files
- The
Things that I don't want:
- Automatic tracking of source files
- Automatic tracking of header files
This is the current state of this project management project.
A more precise list of feature and incoming features is done in a file called .todo.
In the config.mk file, some variables can be defined. We have two types of variables: necessary variables in order to make the makefile work properly, and optional variables with default values. Here is the exhaustive list:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| NAME | Name of the release binary |
| NAME_DEBUG | Name of the debug binary |
| BUILD_FOLDER | Folder name for generated files |
| INC_FOLDER | Folder name for header files |
| SRC_FOLDER | Folder name for source files |
| SRC | Exhaustive list of source files stored in SRC_FOLDER |
| Name | Description | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| CC | Compiler used | clang |
| CFLAGS_COMMON | Flags shared both for release and debug builds | -Wall -Wextra -Werror -Weverything -pedantic -std=c17 |
| CFLAGS_RELEASE | Flags used for relase build | -O2 -DNDEBUG |
| CFLAGS_DEBUG | Flags used for debug build | -O0 -DDEBUG -ggdb |
| LDFLAGS | Library flags given to compiler such as '-L' | |
| LDLIBS | Library flags given to compiler such as '-l' |
Once all the necessary variables are available, a few commands are available:
$> make help
Usage: make [target]
Here is the list of targets:
- make all Builds the release binary
- make clean Removes generated files except binaries
- make fclean Removes all generated files
- make re Alias for"make fclean && make all"
- make debug Same as "make all" except it uses debug flags
- make redebug Alias for"make fclean && make debug"
- make install Installs the binary/library on the system
- make uninstall Uninstalls the binary/library from the system
- make init Initialize the project (at start only)
- make help Prints this message
You can also provide two extra variables:
- VERBOSE (default: 0):
If enabled, meaningful commands are printed.
A non-meaningful command is a print command, create directories, etc.
ex: `make re VERBOSE=1`
- NO_COLORS (default: 0):
If enabled, no colors will be printed
ex: `make help NO_COLORS=1`