I just spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why my makefile wasn’t working.

Here is my dead simple makefile

.PHONY client
client:
	echo "Test test"

Yet when I ran $ make client the output was always: make: Nothing to be done for 'client'.

But why?

Turns out it had nothing to do with the contents of the makefile, it’s the file name. I named my makefile “MakeFile” which make can’t read by default.

I needed to name my file “makefile”.

If I wanted to leave it named “MakeFile” then I would need to tell make using the -f argument. Who has the time for that though.

Bottom line; keep your makefiles lowercase.