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)

Introduction

In this chapter, we will learn how to perform custom operations at configure time and build time. Let us briefly recall the notion of times as related to the workflow of a project managed by CMake:

  1. CMake time or configure time: This is when CMake is running and processing the CMakeLists.txt files in your project.
  2. Generation time: This is when the files for the native build tool, such as Makefiles or Visual Studio project files, are generated.
  3. Build time: This is when the native build tools are invoked on the platform- and tool-native build scripts previously generated by CMake. At this point, the compiler will be invoked and the targets (executables and libraries) will be built in a specific build directory.
  1. CTest time or test time: When we run the test suite to check whether the targets perform as intended.
  2. CDash time or report time: When the results of testing...