There are lots of resources out there on writing self-documenting make
help. (For example, my version is based upon this
post.) However, most of these require modifying an existing Makefile,
which is tedious when you have many projects, and also perhaps you don't want
to commit the changes to the Makefile. Here's an approach to have access to
make help for all Makefiles, but only locally.
We'll need two things: A Makefile defining the help rule, and a
bash alias to include the custom Makefile when calling make. You
can use any of the existing solutions out there for self-documenting
Makefiles, you can find mine in my dotfiles, .help.Makefile.
Often other self-documenting "help" rules will only document commented rules;
my version documents everything except rules prefixed with "." (such as
.PHONY) or any explicitly ignored with "## @ignore".
Next, edit your ".aliases" file in your home directory to include one of these two lines:
alias make="make -f ~/.help.Makefile -f Makefile"
alias make="make -f Makefile -f ~/.help.Makefile"
The difference between these is the order - Make treats the separate Makefiles
as one joined file; so when including ".help.Makefile" first,
make help will be the default
goal (so calling make will trigger make help),
whereas having "Makefile" first will not change the default goal.
This work is licensed under
CC BY-NC 4.0