In a previous post I’ve talked about makefile-graph - a tool which lets you visualize your Makefile targets so you can better understand how targets relate to others.

The makefile-graph tool initially supported two output formats - dot and tsort. The tsort format prints the topological order after performing a topological sort of the graph, and the dot format outputs a representation of the graph in the Dot language.

Starting with version v0.1.4 of makefile-graph we can now render a graph of the Makefile targets using Apache Echarts, which provides a better interactive experience when inspecting your Makefile targets.

In order to install the latest version of makefile-graph execute the following command.

go install github.com/dnaeon/makefile-graph/cmd/makefile-graph@latest

In order to render a graph using Apache Echarts we need to specify the --format echarts option, e.g.

makefile-graph \
    --makefile examples/Makefile \
    --direction LR \
    --format echarts

The command above will generate an HTML document, which you can save and open.

If you want to use a different theme (e.g. dark, vintage, etc.) you can specify the Echarts theme using the --theme option. The font size and style can be controlled via the --font-size and --font-style options respectively. For example this command will render the graph using the dark theme of Echarts.

makefile-graph \
    --makefile examples/Makefile \
    --direction LR \
    --theme dark \
    --format echarts

For additional information and examples, please refer to the dnaeon/makefile-graph repo.