"Make" command for Windows - possible options?

Question

I am trying to setup Derby.js for Node on my Windows Machine. According to the Derby.js setup instructions, in order to use coffescript, I must do the following:

$ cd ~
$ derby new --coffee first-project 
$ cd first-project 
$ make

This worked, up until the "make" portion, which obviously requires a make program. I downloaded a make.exe file that is supposed to get it going, but it tells me that it can't find the file. I opened the make-file in a text editor to see if the path it pointed to exists, and it does. I'm wondering if it has to reference the path to the file differently since its located on windows and is being run through the command prompt? Does anyone know what I might be able to do? All I can think of is setting it up on a VM of linux, and then copying the files over, but it's a bit of a pain to do.

Solution 1

As you found, a stand-alone make wasn't enough; you needed Cygwin.

make is a program that interprets a makefile and executes the commands in the makefile. But, what are those commands? If you look at your makefile you will see UNIX-style commands that are available in Linux, Mac OS X, or Cygwin but are not available in an off-the-shelf Windows system. Thus, simply grabbing a make wasn't enough.

Solution 2

So I ended up downloading Cygwin and used the "make" system that came with it. It worked perfectly! I honestly have no idea why the GnuWin32 "make" command didn't work, but I suppose this would be helpful to those who encounter the same issue in the future.

Solution 3

Microsoft's implementation of Make is nmake. I don't think it's as advanced as a lot of Make implementations from various Unices, but it should work for simple Makefiles.