Makefile Best-Practices

April 30th, 2019 235 Words

The more projects you work on, the more streamlined your tooling gets. Hopefully. Various services using different languages have different tooling requirements, of course. A sweet Makefile can be the entry to a unified tooling interface.

As long as I can run make build deploy in a project, I’m happy. Do you a have more complex interface to deploy a dev environment? Rethink your tooling and remove obstacles for people who want to work on your project or contribute to your code.

Hide Commands

You might have noticed, make will list the invoked commands in a target per default. You can avoid this, and have a more slick output using @ in front of your commands:

greet:
  @ echo "Hi!"
# Without @
$ > make greet

echo "Hi!"
Hi!

# With @
$ > make greet

Hi!

Wildcard Targets

You can always access environment variables in a Makefile, but for composition, you may want to use wildcard targets in make files.

greet-%:
  @ echo Hi $*!
# Say Hi to Frank
$ > make greet-Frank

Hi Frank!

Foreach and Lists

Together with wildcard targets, using lists and foreach can be a powerful addition to your make toolbox:

NAMES := Anne Frank Paul

greet-%:
  @ echo Hi $*!
greet:
  @ make $(foreach NAME,$(NAMES),greet-$(NAME))
# Say Hi to everybody!
$ > make greet

Hi Anne!
Hi Frank!
Hi Paul!

  • AWS re:Invent 2019 Recap & Videos

    December 15th, 2019 364 Words

    I was able to attend the AWS re:Invent 2019 conference. A week full of learning about current and new technologies, services, and general approaches is definitely overwhelming. There is no much content available, during the conference, and as videos and slide decks afterwards. I tried to list my favourite talks. There are way too much of them.

  • AWS Single Sign-On and Multi-Account Cloud Setup

    German August 16th, 2019
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    German July 2nd, 2019
  • CloudFormation Best-Practices

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    You can find plenty of frameworks and tools to provision your AWS resources. Some of them do a great job for a specific purpose, others are more generic. Nevertheless, I do prefer to use native CloudFormation templates as much as possible.

  • AppSync GraphQL API with Custom Domain and CloudFormation

    April 7th, 2019 272 Words

    With AWS AppSync, it’s easy to run your own serverless GraphQL service API. Thanks to Velocity Mapping Templates, DynamoDB, and AWS Lambda your can aim for an architecture without any maintenance at all.