Unlike a target, .PHONY can be populated incrementally. For example, this: .PHONY: serve live-reload serve: init deps compile db-setup db-migrate

Unlike a target, .PHONY can be populated incrementally. For example, this: .PHONY: serve live-reload serve: init deps compile db-setup db-migrate rails server live-reload: yarn ./bin/webpack-dev-server --host 127.0.0.1 can become this, making things a tiny bit easier to maintain when there are many targets: .PHONY: serve serve: init deps compile db-setup db-migrate rails server .PHONY: live-reload live-reload: yarn ./bin/webpack-dev-server --host 127.0.0.1 Recently I joined an environment that uses Makefiles as the facade in front of pretty much everything, from git submodule update shortcuts to building code and running local development servers. Surprising myself, I’ve quickly grown to appreciate working Makefiles. That said, since the syntax somewhat encourages terseness, when I need to fix a non-trivial target it tends to look like black magic—nothing reading a few man pages can’t fix, but it takes extra time. It’s not my first choice overall, I prefer to leave out the extra layer and document direct command-line calls in a README. If a commonly used tool changes its call in a new version, with README it’s a documentation issue, but with Makefile it’s broken software.