Show HN: Home Maker: Declare Your Dev Tools in a Makefile

Show HN: Home Maker: Declare Your Dev Tools in a Makefile(thottingal.in)

91 points by sthottingal 96 days ago | 65 comments

A developer's machine accumulates tools fast. A Rust CLI you compiled last year, a Python formatter installed via `uv`, a language server pulled from npm, a terminal emulator from a curl script, a Go binary built from source. Each came from a different package manager, each with its own install incantation you half-remember.

I wanted a way to declare what I need without adopting a complex system like Nix or Ansible just for a single laptop. The result was a plain old Makefile.

I wrote a short post on using Make (along with a tiny bash script and fzf) to create a searchable, single-command registry for all your local dev tools. It’s not a new framework or a heavy tool—just a simple way to organize the package managers we already use.

If you're tired of losing track of your local environment, you might find it useful.

camilomatajira 91 days ago |

Make is one of my favorite tools, I believe the author built a simple and robust system. I have certain degree of envy.

I made something similar but with Ansible wrapped as an uv script. What I like about ansible is that it's higher level so I'm able to do complex modifications to my machine without having to write them myself and handle the errors myself because the community behind the tasks have already done it. The idempotency of ansible out of the box is also very nice.

Here is my ansible/uv-script project if someone is interested: https://camilo.matajira.com/?p=591

loveparade 91 days ago |

Or just use nix with home manager. Battle tested, lots of built-in functionality, works perfectly. Author claims the learning curve for it is weeks, but I had my setup up and running in a 1-2 hours at most and have been super happy with it.

IshKebab 91 days ago | |

This must be a different "just" from the just I'm used to!

Weeks sounds way more accurate than 1-2 hours.

loveparade 91 days ago | | |

Now with LLMs it's even easier. Writing nix code is hard, but reading it is straightforward because it's declarative, so you can easily review what an LLM produces. And it's not much code either, a simple home manager setup is maybe 100 lines total.

1. Install nix / determinate nix

2. Tell your favorite llm to set up https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin with home manager if you are on mac, or just home manager if you are on linux

3. Review the code and ask for clarifications

You'll have a set up in 20 minutes.

anuramat 91 days ago | | |

this looks like weeks to you?

  { pkgs, ...}: {
    home.packages = with pkgs; [ neovim lazygit ];
  }

ekropotin 91 days ago |

I think you are re-inventing the wheel https://github.com/nix-community/home-manager

Arthurian 91 days ago | |

I recently used clause code to help me learn nix + home-manager! For anyone considering it - it’s been fun, genuinely useful in my day to day, and I can’t recommend it enough - I now have a source controlled tool kit that I can take with me anywhere I go

ika 91 days ago | |

I agree. I started with Nix flakes in my project and fell in love with them. Then I started using Home Manager, and now I feel complete. I even played with nix-darwin and NixOS. It's an amazing piece of software.

dewey 91 days ago | | |

I’ve gotten used to it and with LLM it’s easier to set up the config without learning all the obscure syntax but on macOS it’s still a very un-native feeling compared to home brew. Having to sudo all the time feels weird for just updating user space apps and configs.

l1ng0 91 days ago | |

If the wheel was a stellated rhombicosidodecahedron

jiehong 91 days ago |

I'd recommend trying to get 1 package manager to handle all of it, like Brewfile [0].

> Docker/containers solve isolation, not tool installation. You do not want to run your editor, terminal, and CLI tools inside containers.

I'm not in agreement here. You can have a Dockerfile in which all tools get installed. You build it, and tag it with, let's say `proj-builder`.

Then you can run commands with a mounted volume like `docker run --volume $(pwd):/sources <tool call>`. And alias it.

[0]: https://docs.brew.sh/Brew-Bundle-and-Brewfile#types

skeledrew 91 days ago | |

That's unwanted overhead IMO. And I definitely don't want to be running my regular stuff in containers; like I did a full disable and yank on snap so I never accidentally install anything with it. And every time I get into a situation where I have to reach for docker, I find that I suddenly have to be watching my disk space. Absolutely hate it.

skeledrew 91 days ago |

I very much have this problem, but this doesn't solve it. I've tried tracking my installs before and it doesn't work. Thing is I just install stuff on demand, and never think about recording the installs... until I need that record. Especially when I'm solving an issue. What I need is a universal automatic tracker that just captures out all.

> Every developer on Linux already knows both.

I've been developing on Linux for over 10 years and I don't. It's like exiting vim: whenever I want to do anything beyond running a command or basic variable use, I have to go lookup how to do it online. Every time.

rekado 91 days ago |

I use a Guix manifest for every project, which describes what dev tools and dependencies I want. When I enter a directory the shell automatically evaluates the manifest and all my tools are ready.

With tooling for deployment I prefer to heed an adaptation of Greenspun's Tenth Rule. Neither Guix nor Nix are really all that "complex" from a user's perspective.

esafak 91 days ago |

you can declare tools and tasks with http://mise.jdx.dev/

jjcoffman 91 days ago | |

im surprised this is so far down, this has changed so much of my setup. Ive swapped from pretty much all managers to this and its been a lifechanger

theowaway213456 91 days ago |

Five years ago, I would've loved this. I love the simplicity and power of good old Make. And I obsess over my workstation's configuration. I used to have a massive bash script I would use to reprovision my workstation after every clean upgrade of Ubuntu.

But these days, I just tell codex to install things for me. I basically use it as a universal package manager. It's more reliable honestly than trying to keep up to date with "what's the current recommended way to install this package?"

I also have it keep a list of packages I have installed, which is synced to GitHub every time the list changes.

Gigachad 91 days ago | |

I feel like even iPad kids are more capable with a computer than HN users these days.

wiseowise 91 days ago | | |

“Father, how do I <do basic thing>”

tpoacher 91 days ago | |

Add the LLM to your makefile then :p

  target:
      llm command "Install X for me."

(PS. I don't even know if I'm joking anymore)

nemosaltat 91 days ago | |

Just add the universal install script to AGENTS.md and yolo https://xkcd.com/1654/

duskdozer 91 days ago |

I've ended up using a pseudo-make bash script with a helper that runs functions only once, mainly because I find adding new stuff to a makefile more annoying, and less intuitive and readable. Haven't come up with something easier so far

tpoacher 91 days ago |

I have something somewhat similar here: https://git.sr.ht/~tpapastylianou/misc-updater

The main difference is I initially only needed a mechanism to check if my "Manually-Installed or Source -Compiled" (MISC) packages have updates, but now it also supports install/upgrading too.

In other words, things I am forced to do by hand outside of a package manager, I now only do by hand once, save it as an 'install' script, and then incorporate it into this system for future use and to check for updates. Pretty happy with it.

0xbadcafebee 91 days ago |

I codify all my AI install/setup/running junk (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/ai-agent-coding) with Makefiles. You can make DRY Makefiles real easy, reuse them, override settings, without the fancy stuff in the author's post. The more you build up a reusable Makefile, the easier everything gets. But at the same time: don't be afraid to write a one-off, three-line, do-almost-nothing Makefile. If it's so simple it seems stupid, it's probably just right.

landdate 91 days ago |

Alternatively, you can use the guix package manager. See here: https://guix.gnu.org/

Configuration is in scheme (guile) so that may be a turn off though.

fer 91 days ago |

There's already a bunch of comments about Nix, so I don't want to repeat them, but really Nix is less complex than a handcrafted series of Makefiles, and significantly more versatile.

With home-manager I have the same packages, same versions, same configuration, across macOS, NixOS, Amazon Linux, Debian/Ubuntu... That made me completely abandon ansible to manage my homelab/vms.

Also adding flake.nix+direnv on a per project basis is just magical; I don't want to think how much time I would have wasted otherwise battling library versioning, linking failures, etc.

Brian_K_White 91 days ago | |

"This problem has already been solved in Canada. Just move to Canada."

Make is generic. Nix is not.

Before I even look at the actual code I already know that it is something I can use immediately on my existing system, no matter what that happens to be, right now, without changing anything else.

It doesn't matter how great nix is because it's not alpine or xubuntu or suse or freebsd or sco osr5 or solaris or cygwin, it's nix.

Even if you're only talking about nix the package manager, or nix the language, and not nix the os, it actually still applies because Make is everywhere and nix is not.

Even if this thing has bash-isms and gnumake-isms, I bet with minimal grief I can still use it on a Xenix system that doesn't even have a compiler (so no building nix) but does have ksh93 and make, even without leaning on the old versions of actual gnu make and bash that do exist.

fer 91 days ago | | |

>Make is generic. Nix is not. Before I even look at the actual code I already know that it is something I can use immediately on my existing system.

Hard disagree on this one. It's a series of makefiles that depend on apt (or whatever pacman you choose), so for any heterogeneous environment it's going to constantly be uphill battle to keep working in terms of package naming, existence of dependencies, etc. You'd find yourself reinventing Ansible, but worse.

> It doesn't matter how great nix is because it's not alpine or xubuntu or suse or freebsd or sco osr5 or solaris or cygwin, it's nix.

Nix runs fine on most (all?) modern Linux distros, macOS, even WSL, and there are workarounds to make it run on BSD, though I admittedly haven't tested those.

> Even if this thing has bash-isms and gnumake-isms, I bet with minimal grief I can still use it on a Xenix system that doesn't even have a compiler (so no building nix) but does have ksh93 and make, even without leaning on the old versions of actual gnu make and bash that do exist.

Use it on Xenix (which last shipped in 1991) to do what? The package management was tarballs and compiling. Instead of reinventing Ansible, you'd be reinventing pkgsrc. Not sure what your point here is.

sudonem 91 days ago |

My approach might be an outlier, but I’ll share since it’s a bit more platform agnostic.

I do almost all of it work in the terminal, so I had already been using chezmoi to manage my dotfiles for a few years. Eventually I added an Ansible bootstrapping playbook that runs whenever I setup a new environment to install and configure whatever I like.

I’m already living & breathing Ansible most days so it wasn’t a heavy lift, but it’s a pretty flexible approach that doesn’t bind me to any specific type of package manager or distro.

stevekemp 91 days ago |

I like the way that golang supports the use of tools in the go.mod file.

Something like:

     go get -tool github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@v1.64.4

And then you can list tools :

     go list -f '{{.Tool}}' all

ANd run them:

     go tool staticcheck ./...

evilbob93 91 days ago |

I like the idea, and I would like to use it. It still requres me to be conscious enough to add a new tool to it.

I'd love to see something like a "discover" option that attempts to scan what things I have added to assist me in building the make for the next time.

hantusk 91 days ago |

I can recommend Pixi for this. https://pixi.prefix.dev/latest/

pixi init && pixi add wget

And youre ready to go, everything confined to the venv within the directory

weitzj 91 days ago |

I tried Nix. Worked. Then I forgot the syntax.

Therefore my middle ground is devbox.

It is like python vietualenv but backed by Nix. So I have a devbox.json file to define packages and devbox will do the Nix part for me.

I am getting a MacOS and Linux setup from this for aarch64 and x86

gigatexal 91 days ago |

I love this for two reasons. 1) it's using make. I love make. I am a noob and only use it on its surface but I'm a huge fan. and 2) kinda related to 1) I learned a ton about make from this very project.

Kudos to you!

tmarice 91 days ago |

I’ve been using devenv.sh for the last year for this, and never been happier.

Daegalus 91 days ago |

You can literally use Brew for a lot of things. Linux brew is pretty good these days.

If you want this makefile way, use Justfiles,which are modernized Makefiles so you dont have 30 years of cruft and such being injected into it.

But also at the end of the day, Mise exists and is directly targetted for this.

I personally use Brew bundle files + Dotter for my home/tools management. Brew bundles also support Flatpaks these days and i can install those too.

axegon_ 91 days ago |

I used to do that but there are a few catches. As much as I brush off people who use any OS other than Linux, there is a time when you will have to do something on another operating system. A lesson I learned the hard way: Make on Windows sucks royally. While I agree with the general idea and I also tend to be conservative about new technologies (even more so with all the slop-coding lately), just[1] is now a very mature and well thought out alternative.

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

bargainbin 91 days ago |

If you haven’t tried it, I highly recommend Mise. It manages everything at the user level so it’s not as “all encompassing” as Nix and is readily compatible with immutable distros.

https://mise.jdx.dev/

Your solution is akin to putting your dotfiles in the code repo, which is going to cause issues with languages with poor version compatibility (such as node and python) when switching between old projects.

Also, bold of you to assume developers know make and bash just because they’re using Linux!

ManuelKiessling 91 days ago | |

These days, all dev tooling of my projects lives behind mise tasks, and the runtime for my projects is Docker.

This means that getting a project in shape for development on a new system looks like this:

- clone project

- `mise run setup`

I have zero dev tools on my host, projects are 100% self-contained.

Pure bliss.

See https://github.com/dx-tooling/sitebuilder-webapp for an example.

igor47 91 days ago | |

I cannot endorse mise more highly. I commit it to my repos to make sure every engineer has the same environment. I use it in CI for consistency there as well. I keep all commands that would normally be documented in a readme as mise tasks. I use mise to load the environment, independent of language specific tools like dotenv. I use a gitignored mise.local to put real creds into the environment for testing.

zelphirkalt 91 days ago | |

Question about Mise: Does it manage checksums or a lock file per environment somewhere? I scrolled through the getting started page and didn't see anything at first glance.

ricardobeat 91 days ago | | |

Releases are signed, but lockfiles are not commonly used for this purpose. For your home env you'll usually want the latest version of every tool.

When installing tools, or via mise.toml, you can define version ranges with the precision you'd like - "3" / "3.1" / "3.1.2".

figmert 91 days ago | | |

Mise supports lock files but also validates checksums when possible.

0xbadcafebee 91 days ago | |

I use mise, but its conclusion that everybody needs to write an aqua plugin now is annoying. They need to make plugin-making a lot easier.

saint_yossarian 91 days ago | | |

What conclusion do you mean? Aqua is just one of the many backends it supports.

For example there's also the GitHub backend which lets you install binaries from releases, no plugin needed at all.