makefile-best-practices

When creating or modifying Makefiles, follow these principles to ensure they are self-documenting and user-friendly.

1. Default Target Must Be help

Always set help as the default target so users can discover available commands:

.DEFAULT_GOAL := help

This ensures running make without arguments shows available targets instead of executing an arbitrary first target.

2. Self-Documenting Help Target

The help target should automatically build itself from comments in the Makefile. Use the ## comment pattern:

target-name: ## Description of what this target does
	@command here