Book Image

Modern CMake for C++

By : Rafał Świdziński
5 (2)
Book Image

Modern CMake for C++

5 (2)
By: Rafał Świdziński

Overview of this book

Creating top-notch software is an extremely difficult undertaking. Developers researching the subject have difficulty determining which advice is up to date and which approaches have already been replaced by easier, better practices. At the same time, most online resources offer limited explanation, while also lacking the proper context and structure. This book offers a simpler, more comprehensive, experience as it treats the subject of building C++ solutions holistically. Modern CMake for C++ is an end-to-end guide to the automatization of complex tasks, including building, testing, and packaging. You'll not only learn how to use the CMake language in CMake projects, but also discover what makes them maintainable, elegant, and clean. The book also focuses on the structure of source directories, building targets, and packages. As you progress, you’ll learn how to compile and link executables and libraries, how those processes work, and how to optimize builds in CMake for the best results. You'll understand how to use external dependencies in your project – third-party libraries, testing frameworks, program analysis tools, and documentation generators. Finally, you'll get to grips with exporting, installing, and packaging for internal and external purposes. By the end of this book, you’ll be able to use CMake confidently on a professional level.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Introducing CMake
5
Section 2: Building With CMake
10
Section 3: Automating With CMake

Chapter 11: Installing and Packaging

Our project has been built, tested, and documented. Now, it's finally time to release it to our users. This chapter is mainly about the two last steps we'll need to take to do that: installation and packaging. These are advanced techniques that build on top of everything we've learned so far: managing targets and their dependencies, transient usage requirements, generator expressions, and much more.

Installation allows our project to be discoverable and accessible system-wide. In this chapter, we will cover how to export targets so that another project can use them without installation, as well as how to install our projects so that they can easily be used by any program on the system. In particular, we'll learn how to configure our project so that it can automatically put different artifact types in the correct directory. To handle more advanced scenarios, we'll introduce low-level commands for installing files and...