58 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
58 lines
1.9 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: >
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just vs make
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pubDate: 2023-04-11
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permalink: >-
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daily/2023/04/11/just-vs-make
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tags:
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- devops
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- just
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- make
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- linux
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---
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`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:
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## Tabs or spaces
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A Makefile needs to use tabs. Justfiles are more flexible and work with tabs or any number of spaces.
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## .PHONY
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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.
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## Passing arguments
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This is how a `composer` target looks like in a Makefile:
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```make
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composer:
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docker compose exec php composer
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```
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With this, I'd expect to be able to pass arguments to it - e.g. `make composer info drupal/core`.
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But, instead of seeing the expected output, I get an error: `make: *** No rule to make target 'info'. Stop.`.
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This is what I'd need to do to pass arguments to the `composer` target:
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```make
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composer:
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docker compose exec php composer $(COMPOSER_ARGS)
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```
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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.
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`just`, on the other hand, allows for defining parameters to its recipes:
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```language-yaml
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composer *args:
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docker compose exec php composer {{ args }}
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```
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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`.
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I can think of a few others but this is is the main reason why I moved from `make` and later adopted `just`.
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`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`.
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