Makefile Project Template

• Makefile Project Template
  • About
  • How-To
  • Folder Hierarchy
  • .vscode
  • Windows
  • License

About

A GNU Makefile template with auto dependencies.
(Makes dependency files alongside object files, and uses them as prerequisites to only rebuild changed files)

How-To

Put all source files in PATH_SRC (the src folder by default)
You can put libraries in PATH_LIB and set the LDLIBS.
That's it.

Use make help to see all the available targets.
There are some targets for cleanup (clean clean-obj clean-dep clean-exe delete-build)
And a target to run the program (make run ARGS="arg1 arg2...")

Source file names are put in FILES automatically (all .cpp files in PATH_SRC)
if you want to write them manually, don't prefix $(PATH_SRC)/ for the items and don't forget to put nested PATH_SRC folders in the FOLDERS variable.

Folder Hierarchy

By default:

- bin
- build
   - obj
   - dep
- lib
- src
Makefile

.vscode

Optional for VSCode.
This folder contains a sample launch.json and tasks.json required for building in VSCode.
The build task is simply running the make command. Launching (F5) does this as the preBuildTask and runs the program in gdb (and skips the std:: namespace for easier debugging).

Windows

It is highly recommended to use a Bash-like environment (with tools such as MSYS or WSL) to make the best of Makefiles on Windows.
Trying to only use MinGW with CMD may lead to many problems.

No Bash: (click to expand)

For the Makefile to work without Bash, some changes need to be made:

• The Unix commands need to be replaced with DOS ones.

  In common_vars.mk:

  ifeq ($(OS),Windows_NT)
    MKDIR  = mkdir
    RM     = del
    RMDIR  = rmdir /S /Q
    COPY   = copy
    MOVE   = move
    RENAME = ren
    NULL_DEVICE = nul
  else
    MKDIR  = mkdir -p
    RM     = rm -f
    RMDIR  = rm -rf
    COPY   = cp
    MOVE   = mv -f
    RENAME = mv -f
    NULL_DEVICE = /dev/null
  endif

• In the Makefile, unix slashes (/) have to be changed to backslashes (\)

  These ones in particular:

  • Line 4, 5, 6.
  • Line 34.
  • Line 48, 55, 56.
  • Line 65, 66, 67.
  • Line 71.

• The postcompile step requires the touch command which is not available on Windows.

  You can either remove the postcompile step:
  [Remove lines 34 and 39, and change .dTMP at the end of line 33 to .d]
  Or get a touch command equivalent. (the touch command makes a file if it doesn't exist, and sets the last modified date to now if it does)
  Alternatively, since only the last modified date change is used for the postcompile step, you can just change touch $@ (line 34) to the dos command copy /b $@ +,,

• To automatically find source files, the FILES and FOLDERS (lines 20 and 21) have to be changed because they use the find command not available on Windows:

  FILES   = $(subst $(subst /,\,$(CURDIR))\src\,,$(shell dir /B /S /A-D $(PATH_SRC)\*.cpp))
  FOLDERS = $(subst $(subst /,\,$(CURDIR))\src\,,$(shell dir /B /S /A:D $(PATH_SRC)))
  # Alternatively:
  # FILES   = $(foreach F, $(shell dir /B /S /A-D $(PATH_SRC)\*.cpp), $(lastword $(subst \src\, ,$F)))
  # FOLDERS = $(foreach F, $(shell dir /B /S /A:D $(PATH_SRC)), $(lastword $(subst \src\, ,$F)))

• The \* at the end of lines 65 and 66 should also be removed.

And for vscode, since the make executable is named mingw32-make in MinGW, you should make the change in tasks.json.
Or you can create a symbolic link of the executable (mklink make.exe mingw32-make.exe) or a make.bat file with the following content in your environment path:

mingw32-make %*

License