Book Image

CMake Best Practices

By : Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor
5 (2)
Book Image

CMake Best Practices

5 (2)
By: Dominik Berner, Mustafa Kemal Gilor

Overview of this book

CMake is a powerful tool used to perform a wide variety of tasks, so finding a good starting point for learning CMake is difficult. This book cuts to the core and covers the most common tasks that can be accomplished with CMake without taking an academic approach. While the CMake documentation is comprehensive, it is often hard to find good examples of how things fit together, especially since there are lots of dirty hacks and obsolete solutions available on the internet. This book focuses on helping you to tie things together and create clean and maintainable projects with CMake. You'll not only get to grips with the basics but also work through real-world examples of structuring large and complex maintainable projects and creating builds that run in any programming environment. You'll understand the steps to integrate and automate various tools for improving the overall software quality, such as testing frameworks, fuzzers, and automatic generation of documentation. And since writing code is only half of the work, the book also guides you in creating installers and packaging and distributing your software. All this is tailored to modern development workflows that make heavy use of CI/CD infrastructure. By the end of this CMake book, you'll be able to set up and maintain complex software projects using CMake in the best way possible.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Part 1: The Basics
5
Part 2: Practical CMake – Getting Your Hands Dirty with CMake
14
Part 3: Mastering the Details

Chapter 8: Executing Custom Tasks with CMake

Building and shipping software can be a complex task and no tool can ever do all the different tasks that are needed to do so. At some point, you may want to execute a task that is not covered by the compiler or CMake's functionality. Common tasks include archiving build artifacts, creating hashes to verify downloads, or generating or customizing input files for the build. There are also lots of other specialized tasks that depend on the environment a certain software is built inside.

In this chapter, we will learn how to include such custom tasks in a CMake project and how to create custom build targets and custom commands. We will go over how to create and manage dependencies between targets and how to include or exclude them from the standard builds.

Including such external programs in the build steps of a project can help ensure that the code is kept consistent, even when many people contribute to it. As a CMake build is...