If you are working on a non-trivial software solution, you probably have several projects. Maybe one for the frontend, and one for the backend? Maybe one for managing data, or secrets, or deployment? Or did you drink the micro-services kool-aid (please don’t), and have now dozen of projects, each one containing a small server?

In this case, the README file for these projects probably have a common structure (“How to setup”, “How to run”, “How to test”) – but all of them will contain different invocations. Sometime the project needs to be started with npm run, or node server.js, or ember server – and some other project with bundle exec rails server, or maybe ./bin/server.

What if we could instead express standard shortcuts for all these commands?

That’s what Unix project maintainers have been doing for ages – and also what we eventually did with Captain Train projects: we used Makefiles.

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