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Some teams cannot ask every collaborator to install a tool, and some projects want the deployment experience to travel with the code. make embed vendors the keel CLI into another repository: cross-compiled binaries for every platform, and a managed block of Makefile targets that picks the right one.

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Embedding

From a checkout of the Keel source repository:
This:
  1. Builds keel for macOS, Linux, and Windows on amd64 and arm64 into your-project/.keel/bin/, with a SHA256SUMS file.
  2. Writes your-project/.keel/.gitignore so Keel’s machine-local state (dev.db) stays out of version control while bin/ is committable, and removes a root-level .keel/ ignore line that would override it.
  3. Adds a marker-delimited block of keel-* targets to your-project/Makefile, creating the file if needed.
Commit .keel/bin, .keel/.gitignore, and the Makefile. The binaries are a few tens of megabytes in total.

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Using the embedded CLI

Anyone who clones the project can run:
The targets detect the host OS and architecture and call the matching binary from .keel/bin/. Pass flags through ARGS, for example make keel-dev ARGS="-p 3500".

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Updating

Re-run make embed DIR=../your-project from a newer Keel checkout. The binaries are rebuilt and the managed Makefile block is replaced in place — everything else in the Makefile is left alone. Commit the result.

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When to embed and when to install

Both give the same keel; the choice is about distribution. Keel Cloud is the third option: nobody installs anything, and the deployment runs on a server. See Keel Cloud.