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unmake is a makefile linter emphasizing portability. We target the POSIX make standard.

With unmake, you can develop practical, portable makefile scripts, such as for provisioning dev environments.

No need for more heavyweight tools like Ansible, Docker, Lua, Python, or WSL! Just good ol' make.

$ cd fixtures/parse-valid

$ unmake .
warning: ./Makefile: MAKEFILE_PRECEDENCE: lowercase Makefile to makefile for launch speed
warning: ./boilerplate-ats.mk:4: SIMPLIFY_AT: replace individual at (@) signs with .SILENT target declaration(s)
warning: ./missing-posix.mk:1: STRICT_POSIX: lead makefiles with the ".POSIX:" compliance marker, or else rename include files to *.include.mk
...

See unmake -h for more options.

See makefile for a live example of a portable dev environment provisioning script for this Rust project.

unmake applies a stricter reading of POSIX syntax than make -n. Whereas make -n may skip inactive sections depending on control flow, unmake scans each line. For example, make -n may only check instructions specific to building the default task.

In fact, the two checks complement each other. make -n checks for dry-run runtime issues. unmake checks for syntactic portability issues.

unmake automatically recurses over directories.

When recursing over directories, unmake skips symlinks.

unmake skips many implementation-specific files such as GNUmakefile.

unmake skips many machine-generated makefiles. For example, makefiles produced by autotools; Perl; and cmake when using the Unix Makefile generator (both in-source builds and out-of-source builds).

unmake skips any third party makefiles housed in subdirectories like .git, node_modules, or vendor.

To investigate makefiles in more detail, see the --debug or --inspect command line options for unmake.

unmake can identify low level makefile quirks, such as invalid syntax.

See SYNTAX.md for more information.

unmake can identify higher level portability recommendations for makefiles.

See WARNINGS.md for more information.

https://crates.io/crates/unmake

https://docs.rs/unmake/latest/unmake/

https://github.com/mcandre/unmake/releases

$ cargo install --force --path .

(None)

• jq

For more details on developing crit itself, see DEVELOPMENT.md.

FreeBSD

Some projects using unmake to safeguard their makefiles:

• buttery, a GIF looper
• crit, a Rust cross-compiler
• factorio, a Go cross-compiler
• octane, a MIDI forwarder
• slick, a POSIX sh syntax validator

• BSD make, a popular make implementation with BSD extensions
• cmake, a make-adjacent build system with its own portability features
• GNU make, a popular make implementation with GNU extensions
• Grunt, Node.js task runners
• invoke, a task runner for Python projects
• lake, a task runner for Lua projects
• mage, a task runner for Go projects
• ninja, a fast build system without conditionals
• nmake, a make-adjacent build system for .NET projects
• Rake, a task runner for Ruby projects
• Shake, a task runner for Haskell projects
• ShellCheck, a linter for POSIX sh family shell scripts
• slick, a POSIX sh syntax validator
• tinyrick, a task runner for Rust projects