Creating nodes using make

Note

This is only documented in order ot explain some "advanced" concept in the makefile, mostly for historic reasons and for those interested in novel usage of makefiles. It is recommended to use the mpn script instead

The previous section showed how nodes could be manually created by giving a few parameters to the mkmpnode script as well as the simplified method with mpn using a strict naming convention of the nodes.

The makefile was the original method of creating nodes and for historic reason we finish with a short description of how the this method works.

The makefile method is functionally almost identical to the method with specifically named nodes with mpn as described above.

This is done with the makefile target node.

Examples of using the Makefile directly

The makefile is used as the driver to create these named nodes. By default, the makefile have three nodes predefined which are created as so

% make node

the following three default nodes are then prepared:

• ub20fs01 (Based on "focal", a.k.a Ubuntu 20 LTS )
• ub22fs01 (Based on "jammy", a.k.a Ubuntu 22 LTS )
• ub24fs01 (Based on "noble", a.k.a Ubuntu 24 LTS )

In order to build all nodes in parallel use the usual -j option to make. So for example to build up to four nodes in parallel call

% make -j4 node

As their names suggest these nodes are created with a full development environment based on the cloud init template fulldev-config.in which installs a complete C/C++ development environment with some of the most commonly used libraries. All created machines are small.

In order to create a custom set of nodes the node names can either:

1. be supplied as overridden makefile variables (recommended) or
2. be setup by changing the makefile variable in the makefile

An example will clarify this.

Assume that we instead wanted to create two large Ubuntu 22 nodes with full development configuration and one X-Large Ubuntu 24 node with just the minimal dev environment. We can then override the $(NODES) makefile variable on the command line as so

% make NODES="ub22fl11 ub22fl12 ub24mx13" node

The makefile will "under the hood" then make the following three calls to the actual node creating script

./mkmpnode.sh -r jammy -c cloud/fulldev-config.yaml -m 2GB -d 10GB ub22fl11
./mkmpnode.sh -r jammy -c cloud/fulldev-config.yaml -m 2GB -d 10GB ub22fl12
./mkmpnode.sh -r noble -c cloud/minidev-config.yaml -m 4GB -d 15GB ub24mx13

Which will create two more large "jammy" (Ubuntu 22 LTS) nodes and one x-large "noble" (Ubuntu 24 LTS) node exactly as the node names specified.

Makefile targets

Target	Purpose
all	The default target that will instantiate all *.yaml files from the corresponding *.in templates.
node	Create the nodes specified by the $(NODES) makefile variable
clean	Delete all generated files
distclean	In addition to clean also remove any created distribution tar-ball.
dist	Create a distribution tar ball
install	Install the package (by default /usr/loca is used as prefix)
uninstall	Uninstall the package
_dbg	Print all Makefile variables
docs	Generate documentation