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

Every project has to deal with dependencies and CMake makes it relatively easy to find out whether these dependencies are present on the system where we configure our project. Chapter 3, Detecting External Libraries and Programs, showed how to find dependencies installed on the system and we have used that same pattern so far. However, if dependencies are not satisfied, the most we can achieve is fail the configuration and alert the user of the reasons for such a failure. However, with CMake it is possible to organize our projects such that dependencies can be automatically fetched and built if they are not found on the system. This chapter will present and analyze the ExternalProject.cmake and FetchContent.cmake standard modules and their use in the superbuild pattern. The former allows us to retrieve the dependencies of our project at build time and has been a part...