The Makefile I wish I had for C Development

This is the summary of my experience applied to programming in C. My ambition is to put together all good practices and necessary features of a well-driven C project. I would like to include good compilation, sub-projects, static analyzers, and testing processes.

I want this makefile to be easy to use, easy to get started with and well-documented.

I have worked on this project on and off multiple times. Today, I don't code in C anymore, so I want to share the current state of this project. The initial goal of this project was very ambitious, and I let anyone use this Makefile if he/she finds it useful.

Ambition

The ultimate makefile must be intuitive, simple, configurable, easy to understand and finally and most importantlty practical.

Documentation

Getting Started

Basically you can copy/paste the whole content of the makefile into your project. You can then use make init in order to have a minimal viable project. This will create the minimal file you need in order to start your project.

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FauconFan/makefileC/master/Makefile -o Makefile
make init

Features

• Support basic rules:
  • make or make all: build the binary
  • make clean: remove all binaries and generated files except the binary
  • make fclean: remove all binaries and generated files
  • make re: shortcut for make fclean && make all
• Debug mode make debug and make redebug
• Help command make help
• Init command make init (when starting a new project only)
• Verbose mode with VERBOSE=1 make VERBOSE=1 [target] (prints out meaningful commands)
• Compile or recompile only if necessary (source files as well as header files)
• If no file needs to be recompiled, nothing is done (no relink)
• Progress status during (re)compiling (per file)
• Multithread support (native makefile feature)
• Out-of-source builds (the source and header directory is not altered in any way)
• Configuration through a config file config.mk
  • Specify names of final binaries (release and debug)
  • Change compiler and flags (warnings, optimization, debug, standard, etc...)
  • Specify source, build, and include directories names
  • List all source files
• Error handling
  • The config.mk file is missing
  • Missing variables
  • Unauthorized variables are defined
  • Specified files are missing
  • Presence of unspecified files

Things that I don't want:

• Automatic tracking of source files
• Automatic tracking of header files

This is the current state of this project management project.
A more precise list of feature and incoming features is done in a file called .todo.

Documentation of config.mk

In the config.mk file, some variables can be defined. We have two types of variables: necessary variables in order to make the makefile work properly, and optional variables with default values. Here is the exhaustive list:

Necessary Variables

Name	Description
NAME	Name of the release binary
NAME_DEBUG	Name of the debug binary
BUILD_FOLDER	Folder name for generated files
INC_FOLDER	Folder name for header files
SRC_FOLDER	Folder name for source files
SRC	Exhaustive list of source files stored in SRC_FOLDER

Optional Variables

Name	Description	Default value
CC	Compiler used	clang
CFLAGS_COMMON	Flags shared both for release and debug builds	-Wall -Wextra -Werror -Weverything -pedantic -std=c17
CFLAGS_RELEASE	Flags used for relase build	-O2 -DNDEBUG
CFLAGS_DEBUG	Flags used for debug build	-O0 -DDEBUG -ggdb
LDFLAGS	Library flags given to compiler such as '-L'
LDLIBS	Library flags given to compiler such as '-l'

Available commands of make

Once all the necessary variables are available, a few commands are available:

$> make help
Usage: make [target]

Here is the list of targets:
  - make all                       Builds the release binary
  - make clean                     Removes generated files except binaries
  - make fclean                    Removes all generated files
  - make re                        Alias for "make fclean && make all"
  - make debug                     Same as "make all" except it uses debug flags
  - make redebug                   Alias for "make fclean && make debug"
  - make install                   Installs the binary/library on the system
  - make uninstall                 Uninstalls the binary/library from the system
  - make init                      Initialize the project (at start only)
  - make help                      Prints this message

  You can also provide two extra variables:
  - VERBOSE (default: 0):
      If enabled, meaningful commands are printed.
      A non-meaningful command is a print command, create directories, etc.
        ex: `make re VERBOSE=1`
  - NO_COLORS (default: 0):
      If enabled, no colors will be printed
        ex: `make help NO_COLORS=1`