Book Image

CMake Cookbook

By : Radovan Bast, Roberto Di Remigio
Book Image

CMake Cookbook

By: Radovan Bast, Roberto Di Remigio

Overview of this book

CMake is cross-platform, open-source software for managing the build process in a portable fashion. This book features a collection of recipes and building blocks with tips and techniques for working with CMake, CTest, CPack, and CDash. CMake Cookbook includes real-world examples in the form of recipes that cover different ways to structure, configure, build, and test small- to large-scale code projects. You will learn to use CMake's command-line tools and master modern CMake practices for configuring, building, and testing binaries and libraries. With this book, you will be able to work with external libraries and structure your own projects in a modular and reusable way. You will be well-equipped to generate native build scripts for Linux, MacOS, and Windows, simplify and refactor projects using CMake, and port projects to CMake.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Presenting options to the user

The code for this recipe is available at https://github.com/dev-cafe/cmake-cookbook/tree/v1.0/chapter-01/recipe-05 and has a C++ example. The recipe is valid with CMake version 3.5 (and higher) and has been tested on GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.

In the previous recipe, we introduced conditionals in a rather rigid fashion: by introducing variables with a given truth value hardcoded. This can be useful sometimes, but it prevents users of your code from easily toggling these variables. Another disadvantage of the rigid approach is that the CMake code does not communicate to the reader that this is a value that is expected to be modified from outside. The recommended way to toggle behavior in the build system generation for your project is to present logical switches as options in your CMakeLists.txt using the option() command. This recipe will show...