Racket Makefiles

:: Racket

A few years ago I wrote about makefiles for Racket. Some things have changed.

  1. The old makefile built and pushed documentation to a GitHub Pages branch of the repo. That’s no longer necessary: The Racket package catalog builds and hosts documentation.

  2. The Racket package catalog puts a yellow badge of shame on packages with missing dependencies (deps and build-deps in the package’s info.rkt). I want the makefile to check this.

  3. In .travis.yml files for Travis CI, I think the script section ought to simply invoke targets in the makefile — delegating details to the latter.

  4. Likewise some details needn’t even be in the makefile — they can move to the collection’s info.rkt. Example: The list of directories to clean.

  5. The old makefile had separate PACKAGENAME and COLLECTS variables; for single-collection packages they were the same value. I wanted to simplify this to just the package name and use the appropriate package variants of raco commands.

In that spirit, here’s an updated Makefile, which I recently started using in the rackjure, markdown, and frog projects.

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PACKAGE-NAME=rackjure

# Racket 6.1 adds pkg dep checking.
ifeq ($(findstring "$(RACKET_VERSION)", "6.0", "6.0.1"),)
	DEPS-FLAGS=--check-pkg-deps --unused-pkg-deps
else
	DEPS-FLAGS=
endif

all: setup

# Primarily for use by CI.
# Installs dependencies as well as linking this as a package.
install:
	raco pkg install --deps search-auto

remove:
	raco pkg remove $(PACKAGE-NAME)

# Primarily for day-to-day dev.
# Note: Also builds docs (if any) and checks deps.
setup:
	raco setup --tidy --avoid-main $(DEPS-FLAGS) --pkgs $(PACKAGE-NAME)

# Note: Each collection's info.rkt can say what to clean, for example
# (define clean '("compiled" "doc" "doc/<collect>")) to clean
# generated docs, too.
clean:
	raco setup --fast-clean --pkgs $(PACKAGE-NAME)

# Primarily for use by CI, after make install -- since that already
# does the equivalent of make setup, this tries to do as little as
# possible except checking deps.
check-deps:
	raco setup --no-docs $(DEPS-FLAGS) $(PACKAGE-NAME)

# Suitable for both day-to-day dev and CI
test:
	raco test -x -p $(PACKAGE-NAME)

The two main scenarios here:

I think you could probably use this as a template for any single-collection package project. Just change PACKAGE-NAME. Possibly append a target or two for something unique to your project.

This Makefile is designed to work with Racket 6.0 or newer — because I have some existing packages that support Rackets that old. If you only care about Racket 6.1 or newer, then all this:

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# Racket 6.1 adds pkg dep checking.
ifeq ($(findstring "$(RACKET_VERSION)", "6.0", "6.0.1"),)
	DEPS-FLAGS=--check-pkg-deps --unused-pkg-deps
else
	DEPS-FLAGS=
endif

can become just this:

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DEPS-FLAGS=--check-pkg-deps --unused-pkg-deps

By the way, I wouldn’t call myself a very experienced user of make.

For example the way I check for Racket < 6.1 seems smelly — but it was the least-worst way I could figure out.

So please feel free to share any suggestions or corrections in the comments.