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In the beginning there was darkness... but now there is cake!
What is Cake?
Cake is a really thin wrapper around make that runs all targets inside a development Docker/Podman container.
Vision
- Most projects should have a Makefile and a Dockerfile at their root for convenience and portability
- The Makefile is the single source of truth for dev commands
- The Dockerfile is the single source of truth for the dev environment
- A container runtime should not be a hard dependency to build the project.
- Choosing between containerized and "naked" builds should be as easy as typing
makeorcakeinterchangeably - CI/CD pipelines should be able to reuse the instructions from the Makefile in an ergonomic way without having to keep the build context in mind
Why Cake?
Because I found myself constantly writing Makefiles that run their targets in a container, then adding in add-hoc ways for people not to use the container through environment variables, followed by a half-hearted attempt at optimizations through bind-mounts and less frequent restarts, and some faulty logic to avoid name and tag clashes. I figured it was time to extract this into a script. Despite its simplicity, the script covers 99% of my use cases for tools like act without being tied to a specific forge.
Why POSIX sh
Because additional dependencies are a problem, especially in corporate environments. just curl/copy this script into a directory on your $PATH and you're good to go.
Completions
I might provide them for convenience later, but in principle all you need to do is reuse existing make completions. In zsh that looks something like this:
compdef _make cake
How to Use
Just use cake instead of make. The defaults should fit most use cases. If you really have to, you can specify additional docker/podman arguments using $CAKE_RUNTIME_ARGS. I recommend placing these in your .envrc if you need them to stick around due to the specific needs of your project.
