How to use make on windows

The chances are that besides GNU make, you’ll also need many of the coreutils. Touch, rm, cp, sed, test, tee, echo and the like. The build system might require bash features, if for nothing else, it’s popular to create temp file names from the process ID ($$$$). That won’t work without bash. You can get everything with the popular POSIX emulators for Windows:

• Cygwin (http://www.cygwin.org/) Probably the most popular one and the most compatible with POSIX. Has some difficulties with Windows paths and it’s slow.
• GNUWin (http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/) It was good and fast but now abandoned. No bash provided, but it’s possible to use it from other packages.
• ezwinports (https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports) My current favorite. Fast and works well. There is no bash provided with it, that can be a problem for some build systems. It’s possible to use make from ezwinports and bash from Cygwin or MSYS2 as a workaround.
• MSYS 1.19 abandoned. Worked well but featured very old make (3.86 or so)
• MSYS2 (https://www.msys2.org/) Works well, second fastest solution after ezwinports. Good quality, package manager (pacman), all tooling available. I’d recommend this one.
• MinGW abandoned? There was usually MSYS 1.19 bundled with MinGW packages, that contained an old make.exe. Use mingw32-make.exe from the package, that’s more up to date.

Note that you might not be able to select your environment. If the build system was created for Cygwin, it might not work in other environments without modifications (The make language is the same, but escaping, path conversion are working differently, $(realpath) fails on Windows paths, DOS bat files are started as shell scripts and many similar issues). If it’s from Linux, you might need to use a real Linux or WSL.
If the compiler is running on Linux, there is no point in installing make for Windows, because you’ll have to run both make and the compiler on Linux. In the same way, if the compiler is running on Windows, WSL won’t help, because in that environment you can only execute Linux tools, not Windows executables. It’s a bit tricky!

As the field of DevOps and build release engineering continues to grow, many new tools are being developed to help make building and releasing applications easier. One of the tools that has been in use for many years is Make, which is still heavily used by engineers today.

A Makefile is a simple text file consisting of targets, which can invoke different actions depending on what has been configured. For example, with a Makefile, you can invoke a build of your application, deploy it, or run automated tests and it can dramatically increase the efficiency of your workflow.

Initially, it was Stuart Feldman who began working on the Make utility back in 1976 at Bell Labs. However, the version of Make most commonly used today is GNU Make, which was introduced in the late 1980s.

While the tool was originally meant to run on Linux, Make’s popularity has interested those working on other operating systems as well. There are several ways to run Makefiles on Windows, and in this article you’ll be introduced to each option and learn about their strengths and weaknesses.

Using Make on Windows

Before looking at the different options available, you should know why you want to run Makefiles on Windows in the first place. Or rather, if you’re working on Windows, why are you even interested in Makefiles?

Historically, the biggest reason for wanting Makefiles to run on Windows is that the developers in your organization are working on Windows. Seeing as how the de facto standard for languages like C and C++ is to use Make, it’s no wonder that Windows users want the ability to use Make as well.

As applications and infrastructure become more modern, the cloud is another reason for wanting Makefiles on Windows. Many infrastructure engineers want their applications to be run on Linux, likely led by the adoption of tools like Docker and containerization in general. Additionally, on Linux, a Makefile is the primary tool to use in many cases, especially when it comes to building native Linux applications. However, many engineers are still using Windows on their workstations, leading to the question of how to run Makefiles on Windows. Let’s dive into the possible answers.

Chocolatey

Linux users have been using package managers for decades, yet they’ve never gained much traction on Windows. Up until the release of winget, the concept of a package manager was never something that was natively included on Windows. Instead, Rob Reynolds started working on an independent package manager back in 2011 that would come to be known as Chocolatey. Chocolatey is now widely used on Windows to install packages, and you can use it to install make as well.

To do so, run the following command in an Administrative PowerShell window:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://community.chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

You can find the newest installation instructions at any time on the Chocolatey website.

Once Chocolatey is installed, you may have to close down the PowerShell window and open it back up. After that, run the following command:

Once the script is done running, make will be installed. You may need to restart the PowerShell window again, but at this point you are ready to use Makefiles on Windows.

Chocolatey will likely be the most popular option for those who want to stick to a pure Windows installation. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and you don’t need to jump through any hoops or workarounds to get it working.

At this point, you can use make just like you otherwise would, and you can test it by running make -v.

Cygwin

Historically, one of the most popular ways of running any type of Linux functionality on Windows has been to use Cygwin. Cygwin aims to give a Linux feeling to Windows by holding a large collection of GNU and open source tools. It’s important to note that this does not mean it will give you native Linux functionality. However, it does allow you to use Linux tools on Windows. There’s a big difference between the two; for instance, Cygwin does not have access to Unix functionality like signals, PTYs, and so on. It’s a great tool for when you want to use familiar Linux commands but still want them to be run on Windows.

To use Cygwin for Makefiles, start by downloading and installing Cygwin. During the installation, you’ll see a window popping up asking you what packages you want to install. In the top left corner, make sure to select Full and then search for make.

Your search will give you a list of several different packages. You want to choose the one that’s labeled just as make. Change the dropdown menu where it says Skip to the latest version.

Now you can finish the installation by clicking Next in the bottom right corner. Once the installation is done, you can open up Cygwin and verify that make has been installed by executing make --version.

NMAKE

One of the alternatives that you’ll often hear about regarding running Makefiles on Windows is NMAKE. While it is an alternative to make, note that you cannot simply take your existing Makefiles from Linux and run them using NMAKE; they have to be ported.

First of all, the compilers are different on Windows and Linux, so if you are specifying your compiler in your Makefile, you’ll have to change that to whatever is relevant on Windows. At the same time, you’ll have to change the flags that you send to the compiler, because Windows typically denotes the flags using / instead of -.

On top of that, it doesn’t recognize all the syntax that you’re used to from GNU Make, like .PHONY. Lastly, Windows obviously doesn’t recognize the commands that work on Linux, so if you have specified any Linux-specific commands in your Makefiles, you’ll also have to port them.

All in all, if your entire organization uses Windows and you simply want the typical functionality of GNU Make, then NMAKE is a viable solution. However, if you just want to quickly run your traditional Makefiles on Windows, NMAKE is not the answer.

CMake

As with NMAKE, CMake is not a direct way to run your Makefiles on Windows. Instead, CMake is a tool to generate Makefiles, at least on Linux. It works by defining a CMakeLists.txt file in the root directory of your application. Once you execute cmake, it generates the files you need to build your application, no matter what operating system you’re on.

On Linux, this means that it creates Makefiles for you to run, but on Windows it may mean that it creates a Visual Studio solution.

CMake is a great solution if you don’t care too much about running Makefiles specifically, but you want the functionality, namely the ease of use in a build process, that you can get from Makefiles.

Windows Subsystem for Linux

The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is an honorable mention. It’s cheating a bit to say that it’s a way to run Makefiles “on Windows,” as your Makefiles won’t actually be running on Windows.

If you haven’t heard of WSL before, here’s an extremely oversimplified explanation: It uses Hyper-V to create a hyper-optimized virtual machine on your computer, in which it runs Linux. Basically, you get a native Linux kernel running on your Windows computer, with a terminal that feels as if it’s part of Windows.

You should look into WSL if what you care about most is having Windows as your regular desktop environment, but you’re fine with all of your programming and development going on inside of Linux.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are a few different ways you can be successful in running Makefiles on Windows. However, you do need to be wary of the fact that it will never be a perfect solution. Every solution is in some way a workaround, and the closest you’ll get to feeling like you’re using native Makefiles while using Windows is to install something like WSL.

If all this becomes too tedious for you and you’re looking for an easier alternative to optimize your builds, then check out Earthly. Earthly has taken all the best parts of Makefiles and combined them with the best parts of Dockerfiles to help make your build processes more streamlined and effective.

Make is an incredibly powerful tool for managing application compilation, testing and installation, or even setting up the development environment. It comes standard on Linux and macOS, and it is therefore widely adopted. But how can you get started with Make on Windows?

I’ve previously written about using Make for Python development, you might find it interesting.

If you are using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL/WSL2), then you can easily install make with the sudo apt install make command. However, if you want to have the command available natively on a normal terminal prompt then you need to install a Windows-specific version.

How to install Make on Windows?

The easiest way to configure Make is to use the Chocolatey package manager for Windows. It will handle downloading the correct executable, installing it, and making sure that the command is added to the system path.

1. Install Chocolatey if you don’t already have it installed
2. Open an elevated terminal (Run as administrator)
3. Type the command choco install make, approve the installation if prompted

Next, verify that make works, and then you can start using it normally:

>> make --version
GNU Make 4.3
Built for Windows32
Copyright (C) 1988-2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Alternatively, if you’d prefer to use the new native Windows package manager you can use this winget command:

>> winget install GnuWin32.Make

This will download the installer and run it for you automatically. Make will also be added to the list of installed programs so you can uninstall it from the Add or remove programs section. You will still get the following error since the installer does not add make to the system path:

make : The term 'make' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, 
function, script file, or operable program...

To make it executable you need to open the Start menu and search for Edit the system environment variables. Click Environment Variables, then under System variables choose Path and click Edit. Click New and insert C:Program Files (x86)GnuWin32bin, then save the changes. Open a new terminal and test that the command works.

As of writing this article the current version that gets installed with winget is 3.81, so it is older than the one from Chocolatey. You may want to take that into consideration when choosing the installation method. You can check which version would be installed with winget show GnuWin32.Make.

Using Make on Windows

From a syntax perspective there is no difference between Linux and Windows. You still need to write a Makefile and define the shell commands in tab-indented sections. However, the commands themselves need to be adjusted for the changed operating system.

Normally on a Makefile each line runs on a separate shell. If you need to run many commands from the same shell instance then they should be defined on the same line and chained together with the && operator.

.PHONY: test
test: venv
	.venvScriptsactivate && python -m unittest discover
	
.PHONY: venv
venv:
	python -m venv venv

The above example defines phony Make targets for setting up a Python virtual environment and running unit tests. Assuming that you have installed Python, running make test should execute successfully, running zero unit tests since it couldn’t find any.

If you need to make your Makefile support different operating systems, then you have to also detect the operating system to be able to run a different set of commands for each OS. With Windows the added difficulty is that in some cases (MSYS, MINGW) you actually need to use the Linux commands.

This answer on Stack Overflow has one solution for finding the correct environment, relying on how the system Path is delimited by semicolons ; unlike all other OSes. We can use that information to make our small example Makefile work natively on both Windows and Linux:

ACTIVATE := ./venv/bin/activate
PYTHON := python3
ifeq '$(findstring ;,$(PATH))' ';'
	ACTIVATE := .venvScriptsactivate
	PYTHON := python
endif

.PHONY: venv
venv:
	$(PYTHON) -m venv venv

.PHONY: test
os: venv
	$(ACTIVATE) && $(PYTHON) -m unittest discover

The command for activating the virtual environment is different on Windows compared to other OSes. Also the Python executable is named python on Windows, but on Linux you need to use python3. The conflicting commands can be defined as variables and then referenced in the targets.

Similarly, if you’re compiling C or C++ code, you need to use gcc or g++ on Linux, and cl on the Windows developer command prompt. Also the command arguments will need to be different.

Conclusion

It’s possible to use Make natively on Windows, and it’s not even that difficult. If you’re accustomed to using Bash and Linux commands then the switch to PowerShell commands might require a bit of adaptation. Definitely the biggest challenge is to write Makefiles that support different operating systems, but as we saw that can be accomplished with some tricks.

2015-11-17 NOTE: This year we made R packages before we used make The hope is, therefore, that the make that ships with Rtools is all we need. So hopefully we can ignore this?

Makefile — это файл утилиты «make», который сохраняется вместе с кодом в репозитории. Makefile помещают в корень проекта, работает он в двух направлениях:

• как программный код,

• как документация к проекту.

Сам по себе файл Makefile представляет собой набор структурированных программных команд, которые запускает утилита «make». 

Makefile и утилита «make» представляют собой единый инструмент, который объединяет различные программные команды в одном месте и обеспечивает самодокументирование программы. То есть вы пишите программный код, а он самостоятельно вписывается в файл Makefile в виде уникальной структуры.

Makefile и «make» обязательно нужно использовать в больших проектах, когда программирование ведется в нескольких репозиториях и большим количеством разработчиков. В таких проектах работа ведется в запутанном ритме. Сначала одни программисты работают над репозиторием, потом другие. Потом приходят третьи молодые программисты, пытаются разобраться, что вообще происходит в коде, и не могут, потому что предыдущие профессионалы писали в своем стиле, применяя собственный подход и понимание происходящего. Новичку бывает трудно разобрать запутанный код, потому что никто уже и не помнит, кто и что там писал. Чтобы не было подобных ситуаций, придумали Makefile и утилиту «make». Они все структурируют и облегчают восприятие чужого кода.

Make и Makefile — что это?

Makefile и утилита «make» были придуманы для того, чтобы автоматизировать сборку программ и библиотек из программного кода. Такой функционал оказался востребованным среди программистов, поэтому «эта парочка» быстро обрела популярность. Программисты смекнули, что использовать Makefile можно не только для сборки библиотек, но и в других программах. Главное, за что ценят утилиту «make», — это автоматизация сборки. На сегодняшний день использовать Makefile в большом проекте — это стандарт среди разработчиков любых уровней.

Фактически утилита «make» нужна только для того, чтобы запустить файл Makefile, а точнее, «цели», прописанные в этом файле. Шаблон Makefile выглядит таким образом:

#Makefile

Цель№1: <наименование цели>

   команда№1 #<описывается команда, которая должна выполниться>

   команда№2 #<описывается команда, которая должна выполниться>

Важные замечания по шаблону Makefile:

• когда задаете имя цели, можно использовать дефис «-» и подчеркивание «_»;

• список команд будет выполняться в порядке очередности, но каждая следующая команда активируется только в том случае, если предыдущая выполнилась без ошибок;

• команды разделяются между собой табуляцией — это важно;

• после того как закончилось описание одной цели, нужно оставить пустую строку, так как пустая строка отделяет одну цель от другой.

Поэтому формирование Makefile в собственном проекте — это ответственное дело. Нужно корректно разделить команды на цели и задать им понятные имена, чтобы потом было легче понять, что за цель была описана. То есть из Makefile не нужно делать «свалку кода» — нужно изначально придерживаться строгой и понятной структуры. Таким образом, Makefile будет служить для того, для чего был задуман.

Как запустить Makefile

Если Makefile уже сформирован в программе, тогда запустить его достаточно просто. Главное, чтобы утилита «make» была инсталлирована на вашем устройстве. Обычно она инсталлирована по умолчанию. 

Чтобы запустить «make» в Linux, нужно в терминале ввести команду:

     $ make

После запуска утилита «make» найдет файл Makefile и выполнит первую цель, которая в нем записана. Также при запуске можно указать цель, которую нужно активировать. Например:

     $ make <имя цели>

Если нужно, тогда можно указать несколько целей в одном Makefile, которые нужно активировать.

В Windows также можно запустить файл Makefile. Для этого нужно открыть Visual Studio и перейти в нем в каталог, который содержит файл Makefile. Потом нужно ввести команду:

nmake -f Makefile.win

Заключение

Сегодня мы определили, что такое Makefile. По сути, это файл, который помогает собирать и структурировать большие программы. Он используется совместно с утилитой «make», которая на большинстве устройств предустановлена. Именно при помощи этой утилиты и командной строки можно запустить Makefile. В следующих статьях мы обсудим, как создать и редактировать уже созданный Makefile.

MinGW (“Minimalist GNU for Windows”) is a complete runtime environment for gcc to support binaries native to Windows 64-bit and 32-bit operating systems. With MinGW we can build C programs for windows. This tool is also required to build C-programs for microcontrollers. We will be seeing how to write codes for microcontrollers without using the any IDE. And we will use the MinGW compiler along with the microcontroller family toolchain to build the code. We will install mingw and configure it for running the “make” files

This post is the first step in the complete build process. In this post, we will look at installing mingw and adding it to the environment variables.

1.1 Download MingGW

It contains Make that we will be using in Command Prompt on Windows 10.

1.2 Install MinGW

We will now see how to install minGW. In this step, we will look at the important options that need to be selected.

Keep the Installation Directory the same as shown below.

1.2.1 Navigate to your Desktop

Open MinGW Installer. Select Basic Setup, navigate to Packages and Right click on “mingw-developer-toolkit-bin”, “mingw32-base-bin” and “msys-base-bin” Packages and select Mark for Installation.

1.2.2 Navigate to the Top left corner and Left click on Installation then click Apply Changes.

1.2.3 The packages should now be Green (if not, just repeat the process), if they are successfully installed then close the Installation Manager.

1.3 Rename to Make

Navigate to C:MingGWbin. Rename “mingw32-make” to “make”. This will make it easier to use Make in the Command Prompt.

1.3.1 Let’s add Make for usage in Command Prompt.

Press the “Windows Icon” on your keyboard, search and open “Edit the system environment variables”.

1.3.2 Click on “Environment Variables”

1.3.2 Under “System variables”, scroll down to “Path” and double-click.

1.3.3 Click on “New” and add the location “C:MingGWbin” to environment variable and press “OK”.

1.4 Testing Make

Press the “Windows Icon” on your keyboard, search and open “Command Prompt”.

1.4.1 Type “make –version” to confirm that it works. Recheck Step 1.3 – 1.4 if it doesn’t work.