---
title: >
    just vs make
pubDate: 2023-04-11
permalink: >-
    archive/2023/04/11/just-vs-make
tags:
    - devops
    - just
    - make
    - linux
---

`just` compared to `make` is something that was asked during my PHP London talk, and whilst they are similar, `just` has differences for me that explains why I use it:

## Tabs or spaces

A Makefile needs to use tabs. Justfiles are more flexible and work with tabs or any number of spaces.

## .PHONY

With a Makefile, you need to declare some targets as "phony". I believe that this is for targets that don't generate artifact files with that name, so as I'm not compiling and building files with `make`, this is redundant and adds visual noise.

## Passing arguments

This is how a `composer` target looks like in a Makefile:

```make
composer:
	docker compose exec php composer
```

With this, I'd expect to be able to pass arguments to it - e.g. `make composer info drupal/core`.

But, instead of seeing the expected output, I get an error: `make: *** No rule to make target 'info'.  Stop.`.

This is what I'd need to do to pass arguments to the `composer` target:

```make
composer:
	docker compose exec php composer $(COMPOSER_ARGS)
```

Now I can run `make composer COMPOSER_ARGS="info drupal/core"` and see what I was expecting but the syntax isn't what I'd want.

`just`, on the other hand, allows for defining parameters to its recipes: 

```yaml
composer *args:
  docker compose exec php composer {{ args }}
```

Here, I can create as many named parameters as needed and use them in the recipe with the syntax that I wanted - `just composer info drupal/core`.

I can think of a few others but this is is the main reason why I moved from `make` and later adopted `just`.

`just`, for me, gives the flexibilty that I need whilst using a simple and familiar syntax but without some of the confusing and complicated behaviours of `make`.