Today I Learned

Makefiles are an awesome tool which can help you become more productive command-line wise by encapsulating long commands and/or sequences of commands. They also help abstract away complexity.

One practical example of creating a make command would be setting up a Laravel project. All you need to do is create a file called Makefile and type in the following.

.PHONY setup
setup: # Setup project
    composer install
    php artisan migrate:fresh --seed
    npm install
    ...

Now, a new developer who needs to setup his/her project can skip writing down that series of commands by simply typing in the following:

make setup

But this doesn't end here. You can create virtually any command to help you automate certain processes such as creating or deleting files, changing permissions etc.

Here are 2 ways to measure the performance of a function in javascript:

console.time('function');
function();
console.timeEnd('function');

or:

const startTime = performance.now();
function();
const endTime = performance.now();
console.log(`Function took ${endTime - startTime} milliseconds`);

To automatically update your global NodeJS packages just issue the following command. It will list outdated packages and update them via npm install -g.

npm install -g $(npm outdated -g | cut -d' ' -f 1 | sed '1d' | xargs -I '$' echo '$@latest' | xargs echo)

When someone deletes a git tag on a remote and creates a new one with the same name, you might get a similar error like the one below while trying to do a git command, a git fetch for example.

![rejected]           2.10.14    -> 2.10.14 (would clobber existing tag)

The solution is to update your local tags with the new remote tags. This is how:

git fetch --tags -f

If you ever need to check what php version do composer packages and their dependencies require, there's a special command just for that.

composer check-platform-reqs

The output should look something like below. Maybe without the failed steps.

ext-dom        20031129                                                success  
ext-fileinfo    7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-filter      7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-json       1.7.0                                                   success  
ext-libxml     7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-mbstring   7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-openssl    7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-pcre       7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-Phar       7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-SimpleXML  7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-tokenizer  7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-xml        7.3.19                                                  success  
ext-xmlwriter  7.3.19                                                  success  
lib-pcre       10.32                                                   success  
php            7.3.19    league/commonmark requires php (^7.4 || ^8.0) failed   
php            7.3.19    league/config requires php (^7.4 || ^8.0)      failed   

This is useful when your app fails due to unfulfilled dependency requirements.