Simplified Make

A shared makefile to provide a few basic build options for your C projects. Include it in your C project's makefile and it will provide,

$ make                      # build the project; targets go to $(BUILDDIR) directory.
$ make clean                # delete all build output
$ make tests                # run unit tests
$ make install              # copy targets to system directories
$ make DESTDIR=/tmp install # copy targets to /tmp as a staging area

Simplified make uses the C compiler to generate dependency files (placed in the build output directory) which it uses to rebuild any necessary targets when header files are changed. It is designed for Linux and MacOS.

How to...

BIN1 = myapp
BIN1_SRCS = my_app.c more_code.c even_more_code.c

include simplified.mk

Builds an executable binary called myapp. All build targets sent to the ./build directory which is created if it does not exist. make clean will delete all of the targets in ./build; make install will copy myapp to /usr/local/bin; make tests won't do anything in this example.

LIB1 = libmylib.so
LIB1_SRCS = my_app.c more_code.c even_more_code.c
HEADERS = mylib.h

TST1 = mytests
TST1_SRCS = mytests.c

BUILDDIR = ../build
LIB_PATH = ../build
LIBS = -lmylib

include simplified.mk

Builds a shared object called libmylib.so. All build targets sent to the ../build directory which is created if it does not exist. make clean will delete all of the targets in ../build; make install will copy libmylib.so to /usr/local/lib and mylib.h to /usr/local/include.

mytests will be created as a binary executable but it will not be installed. It will link to libmylib.so and can be executed with make tests. The LD_LIBRARY_PATH will include the ../build directory so the dependency will be picked up locally.

Examples

See https://github.com/akwilson/collections for a library and a unit test program.