How do you get the list of targets in a makefile?

Question

I\'ve used rake a bit (a Ruby make program), and it has an option to get a list of all the available targets, eg

> rake --tasks
rake db:charset      # ret         


        

Answer 1

This help target will only print targets which have ## followed by a description. This allows for documenting both public and private targets. Using the .DEFAULT_GOAL makes the help more discoverable.

Only sed, xargs and printf used which are pretty common.

Using the < $(MAKEFILE_LIST) allows for the makefile to be called something other than Makefile for instance Makefile.github

You can customize the output to suit your preference in the printf. This example is set up to match the OP's request for rake style output

When cutting and pasting the below make file, don't forget to change the 4 spaces indentation to tabs.

# vim:ft=make
# Makefile

.DEFAULT_GOAL := help
.PHONY: test help

help:  ## these help instructions
    @sed -rn 's/^([a-zA-Z_-]+):.*?## (.*)$$/"\1" "\2"/p' < $(MAKEFILE_LIST) | xargs printf "make %-20s# %s\n"

lint: ## style, bug and quality checker
    pylint src test

private: # for internal usage only
    @true

test: private ## run pytest with coverage
    pytest --cov test

Here is the output from the Makefile above. Notice the private target doesn't get output because it only has a single # for it's comment.

$ make
make help                # these help instructions
make lint                # style, bug and quality checker
make test                # run pytest with coverage