Make your first target 'help' to give an overview of the main targets. Running make help will search for text which starts with ## and show what that target does.

1help: ## Print the help message
2	@awk 'BEGIN {FS = ":.*?## "} /^[0-9a-zA-Z._-]+:.*?## / {printf "\033[36m%s\033[0m : %s\n", $$1, …

If you have graph-easy (often in the package perl-graph-easy or similar), you can make a graph from the makefile with make2graph (the package is often called makefile2graph).

Start with the command to 'make all targets' (-B), and 'do a dummy run' (-n) with debug into (-d):

1make -Bnd
2make -Bnd | make2graph
3make -Bnd …

Using the basic example, you can make a complete backup of all backup files. This file will depend upon everything inside the $(storage_directory). Unlike bash, you can't just say storage_directory/*: the pattern must be stated as a 'wildcard'.

1$(storage_directory)/backup.tgz: $(wildcard $(storage_directory)/*.md)
2 …

The make system wants to know:

1. What file you want to make,
2. Which other files it depends on, and
3. How to build the file.

Start with a basic test-area.

1mkdir make_test ; cd $_
2printf "%s:\n" README.md > Makefile
3printf "\t%s\n" 'echo "Basic makefile example." > $@' >> …