rake - Because Your Mono-repo Deserves Better

Welcome to the rake world, where complexity meets simplicity and sanity is restored to your multi-project universe.

• rake - Because Your Mono-repo Deserves Better
  • What is rake?
  • Getting started
    • First install
    • Updating
    • Usage
      • Creating a new rake project
      • Using a rake project
  • Why You'll Get Raked With Joy
  • The rake Philosophy

Think of rake as a single make to rule them all – it's the beautifully simple solution that lets you stop wrestling with build orchestration and get back to what actually matters: your code.

At its heart, rake is just a clever Makefile that knows how to talk to other Makefiles. That's it. No fancy frameworks, no mysterious magic, no PhD required. Just good old battle-tested make, git and bash doing what they've done reliably for decades.

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/m374-crypt0/rake/refs/heads/main/.rake/scripts/install | bash

It will install rake and rakeup in your user directory and you'll be able to rake everything

rakeup

# print the manual
rake

# create a new rake project in an empty untracked (not in git repo) directory
rake new

# create a new rake project even in non empty or tracked (in git repo) directory
rake new --force

# create a new rake project without initializing a new git repository
rake new --no-git

# querying existing subs
make sub list

# create a new sub name backend
mdkir backend
touch backend/Makefile

# executing an existing sub target (target build in backend/Makefile)
make backend build

Perfect for the modern mono-repo reality: Got a repo mixing Python microservices, React frontends, Go APIs, and maybe some Rust sprinkled in? rake doesn't care. Each sub-project lives in its own directory with its own Makefile, and rake orchestrates them like a conductor with a very chill attitude.

Zero mental overhead: rake is designed to be invisible infrastructure. It's the boring, reliable tool that Just Works™ so you can focus on your actually interesting problems. No new concepts to learn, no configuration files to maintain, no surprise behaviors.

Compound targets made easy: Want to test everything in your backend project? make backend test. Want to build just the frontend? make frontend build. Want to deploy the whole shebang? make frontend deploy && make backend deploy. rake gives you the power to compose complex operations from simple, predictable building blocks. Icing on the cake, due to how rake is built, you can perfectly rely on autocomplete features of your shell to make rake even easier to use: your subs are directories.

Battle-tested foundation: Built on git, make and bash – tools that have been solving build problems since before most of us were born. If it works on one Unix-like system, it works everywhere. No runtime dependencies, no version conflicts, no surprises.

rake believes that build orchestration should be simple, predictable, and boring. It's not trying to reinvent the wheel or be the next big thing in DevOps. It's just trying to make your life a little easier when you're juggling multiple projects that need to work together.

In a world of over-engineered build systems and complex CI/CD pipelines, rake is the refreshingly simple alternative that lets you get back to building cool stuff instead of fighting with your tooling.

Ready to enter the rake world? Your future self will thank you for choosing simplicity.