kbroman / minimal_make

Minimal make: A minimal tutorial on the most important tool for reproducible research

Minimal make: A minimal tutorial on make

I would argue that the most important tool for reproducible research is GNU Make.

This is a minimal tutorial to get started.

View the thing here.

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This web site is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

minimal_make's Issues

Consider drake

The drake package is an R-focused version of Make, and it may be a better fit for some research projects. The toy workflow in one of the vignettes is an example. If the same project were to use Make with the same set of targets, it would spend more time initializing R sessions than doing actual work.

By the way, I love the blog post that corresponds to this repo, and I share it all the time.

Link to Software Carpentry lesson is broken

Hi,
The link to the lesson (http://software-carpentry.org/v4/make/index.html) returns a 404 for me, should the link now be http://swcarpentry.github.io/make-novice/ ?

cd same line

I'm learning to use make (haven't actually tied it yet) because I saw how nicely you outline it and it made me want to try. I saw you write:

One oddity: if you need to change directories to run a command, do the cd on the same line as the related command. The following would not work:

### this doesn't work ###
Figs/fig1.pdf: R/fig1.R
    cd R
    R CMD BATCH fig1.R fig1.Rout

I saw in Yihui's knitr package he has a make file but put's them (cd and next command) on separate lines. He puts a ;\ after the cd command though.

https://github.com/yihui/knitr/blob/master/Makefile

Do you think this might work?:

Figs/fig1.pdf: R/fig1.R
    cd R;\
    R CMD BATCH fig1.R fig1.Rout