Imagine the following - each time that we need to build our app for iOS and Android we’ll need to do the following steps manually: In the scope of Flutter or Dart development, we can use it to create and chain tasks. You can use it to describe any task where some files must be updated automatically from others whenever the others change. The make utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them.

On the GNU manual for make it states that the purpose of a Makefile is:

Use this tool in any Flutter project we haveīut let’s start at the beginning.

Make it easier to perform those actions with short commands.

Have one place where we define all the actions we want for our project while at the same time creating relations between them.The Makefile allows us to create a set of different commands in one file to automate our workflows. While developing our Flutter projects, there are many repeatable tasks - formatting, running unit tests before we create a PR, cleaning the project, and running or even building the app for different flavors.Īnd although our IDEs can make it easy to perform some of these actions, we may have fallen in love with the Command Line, which you can learn more from in my previous article Flutter and the Command Line - a Love Story, which means that we either created our scripts or we have to type each command by hand each time.

Basic makefile for c program