List all commands in a Makefile

It’s a pretty inscrutable, but Suvash Thapaliya has a snippet of code that will add a help command to any Makefile.

Just add a help target with this long awk string:

help:  ## Display this help
	@awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*##"; printf "\nUsage:\n  make \033[36m<target>\033[0m\n"} /^[.a-zA-Z_-]+:.*?##/ { printf "  \033[36m%-15s\033[0m %s\n", $$1, $$2 } /^##@/ { printf "\n\033[1m%s\033[0m\n", substr($$0, 5) } ' $(MAKEFILE_LIST)

An example Makefile for a TypeScript project that looks something like this (long help target omitted):

##@ Development
.PHONY: install typecheck

install: ## Install dependencies
  @pnpm install

typecheck: ## Check static types
  @pnpm tsc --noEmit

##@ Deployment
.PHONY: build

build: ## Build for production
  @rm -rf build
  @pnpm tsc

Running make help will show this:

$ make help

Usage:
  make <target>

Development
  install          Install dependencies
  typecheck        Check static types

Deployment
  build            Build for production

The snippet makes it so that ## after a target becomes the help text for that target, and ##@ before a bunch of targets turns that into a group. (In this example, ##@ Helpers would have gone before help.)

To display the help text when just typing make alone, add .DEFAULT_GOAL = help at the top of the Makefile.