multiple Target-specific Variable Values

The direct answer to your first question is yes, you have to use a separate target line for each target-specific variable and set them one-by-one.

The answer to your second question is yes: one is described by uzsolt. That would be my recommended method as well. One difference between uzsolt's solution and the target-specific variable solution is that target-specific variables are inherited by prerequisites. You don't seem to need that behavior here but if you did then this solution wouldn't work for you.

If you need target-specific variables or if one line per variable assignment is still too painful (for example you have very large numbers of these and you really want to have one line per group), there may be options which are more complicated to understand but simpler to use later.

For example if you know that none of your variable values will contain whitespace then you can create a user-defined macro that uses eval to set target-specific variables, like this:

assign-vars = $(foreach A,$2,$(eval $1: $A))$(call assign-vars, dev_deploy,   env=devenv  image=abc  tag=1.0.4-dev)$(call assign-vars, prod_deploy,  env=prod    image=abc  tag=1.0.3-prod)

Note: the first argument is the target, each assignment must be a single "word" (no embedded space) and there are no commas between assignments.

I would do it:

dev_deploy_env= devenvdev_deploy_image=   abcdev_deploy_tag= 1.0.4-devprod_deploy_env=    prodprod_deploy_image=  abcprod_deploy_tag=    1.0.3-proddev_deploy prod_deploy:    @echo docker run -t --rm -e env=${${@}_env} \      ${${@}_image}:${${@}_tag} \      sh -c "test.sh".PHONY: dev_deploy prod_deploy

See the commands (I'm using FreeBSD and on it the GNU make command is gmake):

$  gmake prod_deploy docker run -t --rm -e env=prod abc:1.0.3-prod sh -c test.sh$  gmake dev_deploy       docker run -t --rm -e env=devenv abc:1.0.4-dev sh -c test.sh

Of course you should remove @echo to run commands.