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

Using CMake via a command-line interface

The most common way of using CMake is via the command-line interface (CLI). CLIs exist in virtually every environment, thus, learning to use CMake in a CLI is essential. In this section, we are going to learn how to perform the most basic CMake operations using the CLI.

Interactions with the CMake CLI can be done by issuing the cmake command in your operating system's terminal, assuming that CMake is installed and the cmake executable is included in your system's PATH variable (or equivalent). You can verify that by issuing cmake in your terminal without any parameters, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 2.1 – Invoking the cmake command

If your terminal is complaining about a missing command, then you should either install CMake (explained in Chapter 1, Kickstarting CMake) or make it discoverable by adding it to your system's PATH variable. Consult your operating system's guide about...