Make Wrapper for Gradle

If you are like me, you want to build everything with make. Even when it is, actually built by something else. In my current project, the build is actually performed with gradle. But I keep typing make, and I do not want to break with that habit.

So here’s what I did: I came up with a small wrapper that runs gradle, or in this case, ./gradlew, from make.

1 .PHONY: -rungradle-
2 -rungradle-:
3 	./gradlew $(MAKECMDGOALS)
4 
5 $(MAKECMDGOALS): -rungradle-

This wrapper will call ./gradlew from make with whatever non-option arguments were given to make. For example, you can call it like make check and it will run ./gradlew check.

Of course a more sophisticated wrapper is thinkable, but for most of the cases this tiny wrapper will do the job. Another possibility would be to turn make into a shell function which checks whether a Makefile is available, and if not, looks for alternatives like a build.gradle, and if it finds an alternative, it runs the suitable alternative build tool, like, in that case, gradlew, but that’s a story for another time.