[jdp]

I like the ideas here, but for long-running processes like file watching, dev servers, hot reloading, etc. a better format is Procfile (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/procfile). The ideas from this article could be nicely applied to it.

Procfil is a format that declares a named list of processes to be run that can be controlled by tools like Foreman (http://ddollar.github.io/foreman/) and Honcho (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/honcho). The advantage is being able to start and stop them concurrently as a group, useful for things that otherwise take a tmux session or multiple windows/tabs, like dev server + file watching + live reload: they become a simple `foreman start`. Processes can also be started individually. Procfiles can also be exported to other formats, like systemd, upstart, inittab, etc.

Here's an example Procfile from a web project I've been working on. Since it uses node I went with node tools like http-server and watch, but it could just as easily use any other web server or file watcher. The way it works is it starts a web server serving public/; starts a live reload server for public/; and watches the src/ directory for changes and re-runs make. The makefile has a few rules for compiling JS and CSS from src/ to public/.

    web: ./node_modules/.bin/http-server
    livereload: ./node_modules/.bin/livereload public
    watch: ./node_modules/.bin/watch make src

[tempodox]

An important point of the article was to use standard tools installed everywhere and not some obscure niche tools. Please note that you yourself felt the need to explain what “Procfil” is in the first place.

[jdp]

I wouldn't consider the industry backing of Heroku and a collective 4,500+ GitHub stars between the tools particularly niche or obscure. Crank it up to ~20k stars if you want to count deploy tools that can use them, like Dokku or Flynn. Anyway, the other great thing about Procfile is that it's just a declarative format. Lots of tools can leverage them, and they are an important part of my and many others' workflows.

I also don't think the article is too keen on "standards", judging by it referring to make a "task launcher" and the suggested usage completely diverging from the expected behavior of the program.

[aikah]

> but for long-running processes like file watching, dev servers, hot reloading, etc.

I don't think anybody should use make to do that at first place. That's not what make was built for. Likewise Foreman should not be used as a build tool because it is not.

EDIT:

now i've seen the makefile in the example,I understand your comment and this is absolutely not where one wants to use make, that's just ridiculous.

[solipsism]

Wouldn't "it's not appropriate for the task" be a better reason not to use something than "it's not made for the task"? Don't you have any better reasons at all? Does make bring out people's conservative side or something?

Let me ask you this. Would you sit on a tree stump? How about kill a fly with a newspaper? Sometimes things are great for purposes for which they weren't originally intended.

[jdp]

The example isn't a makefile, it's a procfile.