In this episode I talk about how I use Makefiles to ease the process of building complicated projects in Lilypond and HTML. You can use Makefiles to run any kinds of commands you want. It does not have to be building actual computer programs. In my case I use them to build musical scores and web pages. Keep in mind I'm not an expert on this, and I'm hoping I will make enough mistakes that it will prompt a series of follow-up episodes by people who actually know what they're talking about.

Here's an example. This is the Makefile for my Counterpoint workbook Gratis ad Parnassum, which I wrote in 2009. Written in a combination of LaTeX

and Lilypond, this requires very complicated and long commands to build the workbook, and I found that the only way to do this project in a sane manner was to create a Makefile that would keep track of changes in the files and only rebuild when necessary. It also meant that the only commands I would have to type were very simple, because the long command line options were all stored in the Makefile.

SHELL=/bin/bashFILE=workbook_mainOUTDIR=outWEBDIR=htmloutVIEWER=evinceBROWSER=firefoxLILYBOOK_PDF=lilypond-book --output=$(OUTDIR) --pdf $(FILE).lytexLILYBOOK_HTML=lilypond-book --output=$(WEBDIR) $(FILE).lytexPDF=cd $(OUTDIR) && pdflatex $(FILE)HTML=cd $(WEBDIR) && latex2html $(FILE)INDEX=cd $(OUTDIR) && makeindex $(FILE)PREVIEW=$(VIEWER) $(OUTDIR)/$(FILE).pdf >& /dev/nullall: pdf webpdf: $(LILYBOOK_PDF) $(PDF) $(INDEX) $(PDF) $(PREVIEW)web: $(LILYBOOK_HTML) $(HTML) cp -R $(WEBDIR)/$(FILE)/ ./ sleep 1 sh html-sed-fixes.sh $(BROWSER) $(FILE)/index.html &keep: pdf cp $(OUTDIR)/$(FILE).pdf gratis.pdf pdftk gratis.pdf update_info gratis.info output GratisAdParnassum.pdfclean: rm -rf $(OUTDIR)web-clean: rm -rf $(WEBDIR)archive: tar -cvvf free-counterpoint.tar  --exclude=out/*  --exclude=*.tar  --exclude=*.zip  --exclude=htmlout/*  --exclude=workbook_main/*  --exclude=*midi  --exclude=*pdf  --exclude=*~  ../FreeCounterpoint/* tar -xvvf free-counterpoint.tar zip -r free-counterpoint.zip FreeCounterpoint rm -R FreeCounterpoint

And here is the Makefile for my song collection called Canciones para niños, using Lilypond source files.

SHELL=/bin/bashpiece = lorca#CPU_CORES=`cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep -m1 "cpu cores" | sed s/".*: "//`LILY_CMD = lilypond -ddelete-intermediate-files                     -dno-point-and-click #-djob-count=$(CPU_CORES)notes = cancioncilla.ily cantada.ily caracola.ily