I resisted learning Make because of the clunkiness around it (Tab-indentation? C-specific features? Gross!), but after using it a few times now I've come to a

I resisted learning Make because of the clunkiness around it (Tab-indentation? C-specific features? Gross!), but after using it a few times now I've come to appreciate it. Most recent case was for Starbound mods. The macOS and Linux versions of Starbound don't ship with any built-in tools for uploading mods to the Steam Workshop (unlike Windows, which apparently has a dedicated GUI for it), and I didn't want to have to manually go through a bunch of SteamCMD steps every time I wanted to publish an update, so for my first real mod I put together a Makefile to automatically pack all the files together (using Starbound's included asset_packer CLI tool), populate a metadata.vdf for the Steam Workshop, and run the right steamcmd incantations to get everything up. Once that was reliably working, I condensed everything into a GitHub template repo (https://github.com/YellowApple/Starbound-Mod https://github.com/YellowApple/Starbound-Mod) and ended up with a pretty straightforward (albeit a bit clunky in spots) universal Makefile: MODNAME = StarboundMod ifeq "$(shell uname)" "Linux" PLATFORM = linux endif ifeq "$(shell uname)" "Darwin" PLATFORM = macos endif SB_PACKER = ../../$(PLATFORM)/asset_packer OUT = ./out SRC_DIRS = achievements ai animations behaviors biomes \ celestial cinematics codex collections \ cursors damage dialog dungeons effects \ humanoid interface items leveling liquids \ monsters music names npcs objects parallax \ particles plants player projectiles quests \ radiomessages recipes rendering scripts sfx \ ships sky spawntypes species stagehands stats \ tech tenants terrain tiles tilesets treasure \ vehicles versioning weather SRC_EXTS = config macros patch png wav STEAMCMD = steamcmd +login $(STEAMCMD_USER) STEAM_ID_PARSER = awk '/"publishedfileid"/{print $$2}' \ metadata.vdf | sed 's/"//g' $(OUT)/pkg/contents.pak: $(SRC_DIRS) $(SRC_EXTS) rm -rf $(OUT)/pkg mkdir -p $(OUT)/pkg $(SB_PACKER) $(OUT)/src $(OUT)/pkg/$(MODNAME).pak $(OUT)/src: rm -rf $(OUT)/src mkdir -p $(OUT)/src cp _metadata $(OUT)/src/ $(SRC_DIRS): FORCE $(OUT)/src @cp -rv $@ $(OUT)/src/$@ 2>/dev/null \ || echo 'No $@ folder present in mod root; skipping' $(SRC_EXTS): FORCE $(OUT)/src @cp -v *.$@ $(OUT)/src/ 2>/dev/null \ || echo 'No *.$@ files present in mod root; skipping' upload: $(OUT)/pkg/contents.pak mkdir -p $(OUT)/workshop cp $(OUT)/pkg/$(MODNAME).pak $(OUT)/workshop/contents.pak cp preview.jpg $(OUT)/preview.jpg sed 's,{{PWD}},$(PWD),g' <metadata.vdf.template >metadata.vdf $(STEAMCMD) +workshop_build_item $(PWD)/metadata.vdf +quit $(eval STEAM_ID=$(shell $(STEAM_ID_PARSER))) sed -i 's/"publishedfileid" "0"/"publishedfileid" "$(STEAM_ID)"/g' \ metadata.vdf.template clean: FORCE rm -rf $(OUT) rm -f metadata.vdf FORCE: All in all, it works well enough. Certainly nicer than trying to do it with shell scripts IMO, and I don't have to worry quite as much about whether someone else using my mod template (including my future self) is able to install some fancier build tool / task runner given how ubiquitous (GNU) Make tends to be.