Makefile Generator

It is a hard rule baked into make: every command line in a recipe must be indented with a single real tab character, not spaces. make uses that leading tab to tell a recipe command apart from other syntax. If you use spaces you get the infamous 'missing separator' error and nothing runs. This generator always emits real tabs, so the output is safe to paste into a Makefile.

A phony target is one that does not produce a file with its own name, like build, test or clean. Listing them under .PHONY tells make to always run the recipe instead of skipping it when a file or folder of the same name happens to exist. Mark a target phony with the checkbox and it is added to the .PHONY line automatically.

Variables are NAME = value assignments at the top of the file, like CC = gcc, that you reuse in recipes as $(CC). Targets are the rules: a name, optional prerequisites after the colon, and one or more tab-indented command lines that make runs to build that target.

Anything you list after the colon, like build: clean install, is a prerequisite. make builds those prerequisite targets first, in the order given, before running the target's own recipe. That lets you chain steps so a single make build can clean, install and then compile.

Save it as a file named exactly Makefile (capital M, no extension) in the root of your project, then run make or make <target> from that directory. GNU make also recognises the name makefile if you prefer lowercase.

No. The Makefile is generated entirely in your browser from the variables and targets you enter, so nothing is uploaded anywhere.