How to pass argument to Makefile from command line?

Question

You probably shouldn't do this; you're breaking the basic pattern of how Make works. But here it is:

action:
        @echo action $(filter-out $@,$(MAKECMDGOALS))

%:      # thanks to chakrit
    @:    # thanks to William Pursell

EDIT:
To explain the first command,

$(MAKECMDGOALS) is the list of "targets" spelled out on the command line, e.g. "action value1 value2".

$@ is an automatic variable for the name of the target of the rule, in this case "action".

filter-out is a function that removes some elements from a list. So $(filter-out bar, foo bar baz) returns foo baz (it can be more subtle, but we don't need subtlety here).

Put these together and $(filter-out $@,$(MAKECMDGOALS)) returns the list of targets specified on the command line other than "action", which might be "value1 value2".

Here is a generic working solution based on @Beta's

I'm using GNU Make 4.1 with SHELL=/bin/bash atop my Makefile, so YMMV!

This allows us to accept extra arguments (by doing nothing when we get a job that doesn't match, rather than throwing an error).

%:
    @:

And this is a macro which gets the args for us:

args = `arg="$(filter-out $@,$(MAKECMDGOALS))" && echo $${arg:-${1}}`

Here is a job which might call this one:

test:
    @echo $(call args,defaultstring)

The result would be:

$ make test
defaultstring
$ make test hi
hi

Note! You might be better off using a "Taskfile", which is a bash pattern that works similarly to make, only without the nuances of Maketools. See https://github.com/adriancooney/Taskfile

Much easier aproach. Consider a task:

provision:
        ansible-playbook -vvvv \
        -i .vagrant/provisioners/ansible/inventory/vagrant_ansible_inventory \
        --private-key=.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/private_key \
        --start-at-task="$(AT)" \
        -u vagrant playbook.yml

Now when I want to call it I just run something like:

AT="build assets" make provision

or just:

make provision in this case AT is an empty string

Few years later, want to suggest just for this: https://github.com/casey/just

action v1 v2=default:
    @echo 'take action on {{v1}} and {{v2}}...'