wondering what this makefile means

So I was browsing repl.it and saw that someone made it possible to run firefox in the repl window. There was a file called Makefile and it had this code in it. I’m wondering what it means and where they are getting Firefox from.

.PHONY: run

run:
    install-pkg python firefox
    python3 launch.py 

Then there is a python file called launch.py

def delete():
  time.sleep(10)
  os.remove("nohup.out")
  print ("Deleted nohup.out.")
thread = threading.Thread(target=delete)
thread.start()
os.system("firefox")

I’m genuinely curious where firefox is coming from and if I can substitute for another app like discord. Aswell as what is makefile Here is a link to the repl where you can hten view the code. https://replit.com/@Jackerin0/Firefox-fixed-originally-made-by-polygott?v=1

Answer

Makefile is a utility for writing and executing series of command-line instructions for things like compiling code, testing code, formatting code, running code, downloading/uploading data, cleaning your directory etc … Basically, it helps automate your dev workflows into simple commands (make run, make test, make clean).

Here’s what it does in this case:

.PHONY: run # explicitly declare the a routine "run" exists, which can be called with `make run`

run: # run routine
    install-pkg python firefox # first, install python and firefox. This will make both firefox and python available as executable binaries that can be launched from the command line
    python3 launch.py # this runs the python script

So when you type make run in terminal, it will run the install-pkg and python3 commands.

Then in the python file:

def delete():
  time.sleep(10) # sleep for 10 seconds
  os.remove("nohup.out") # remove the file named nohup.out
  print ("Deleted nohup.out.")
thread = threading.Thread(target=delete) # create a thread to run the delete function
thread.start() # start the thread
os.system("firefox") # run the executable for firefox (you can replace this with any command from the command line)

The nohup file is created when running a background task. Not sure why it’s being created in this context (maybe because of something specific to firefox or repl), or why you need to delete it.