magefile/mage

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

4690 stars · 279 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Mage is a Make/rake-like build tool for Go where build targets are plain Go functions in magefiles. It compiles and runs those targets with no dependencies beyond the Go standard library and works on all major operating systems.

Use cases

• replace Makefiles with Go-based build scripts
• define cross-platform build tasks that work on Windows
• run project tasks like build, test, and deploy from Go functions
• write build automation without bash or make syntax
• compile a static binary containing build tasks for CI

When to choose

• your team writes Go and wants build scripts in the same language
• you need build tasks that run consistently on Windows, macOS, and Linux
• you find Makefiles hard to read and maintain
• you want zero-install task running via go run from a vendor directory

When to avoid

• your project is not in Go and you don't want a Go toolchain dependency
• you need Make's incremental rebuild and dependency-graph features
• your team already standardizes on make, just, or task runners

Facets

cli-tool · maturity stable

build-tool cli developer-tools developer-tools windows cross-platform go cli makefile-alternative build-automation task-runner golang magefiles command-line automation linux macos

Member repositories

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="magefile/mage")