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

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "FILES_MATCHING cannot be used after PATTERN or REGEX but it can be done vice versa."

A block of code is set as follows:

include(GNUInstallDirs)
install(DIRECTORY dir1 DESTINATION ${CMAKE_INSTALL_
  LOCALSTATEDIR} FILES_MATCHING PATTERN "*.x")
install(DIRECTORY dir2 DESTINATION ${CMAKE_INSTALL_
  LOCALSTATEDIR} FILES_MATCHING PATTERN "*.hpp" 
    EXCLUDE PATTERN "*")
install(DIRECTORY dir3 DESTINATION ${CMAKE_INSTALL_
  LOCALSTATEDIR} PATTERN "bin" EXCLUDE)

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

# ...
-- Installing: /tmp/install-test/qbin/ch4_ex01_executable

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

install(DIRECTORY dir1 dir2 dir3 TYPE LOCALSTATE)

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "To start configuring a project, select the project's root directory by clicking the Browse Source… button."

Tips or Important Notes

Appear like this.