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CMakePackagingProject

Documentation Status

Welcome to the CMakePackagingProject (CPP) repository.

CMake is a meta build system, in that it is a tool for generating cross-platform build systems. To do this, CMake provides a powerful scripting language which must be flexible enough to describe the build and packaging requirements of any project. Unfortunately, this flexibility comes at the price of complexity. While it is easy to use CMake to build and package a project on a single platform, it is non-trivial to ensure that the resulting package can be reliably and reproducibly built and consumed on arbitrary platforms. Generally speaking, with full knowledge of a project's dependencies, generating reliable and reusable packages comes down to following established CMake best practices.

At its core, CPP is a dependency manager, written entirely within the CMake scripting language. By leveraging its internal dependency manager, CPP makes following CMake best practices as simple as filling in the following boilerplate:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION <cmake_version>)
project(<project_name> VERSION <project_version>)
find_package(cpp REQUIRED)

cpp_find_dependency(NAME <depend1>)
cpp_find_dependency(NAME <depend2>)    

cpp_add_executable(
    <program_name>
    SOURCES <list_of_source_files>
    DEPENDS <list_of_dependencies>
)
cpp_install(TARGETS <program_name>)

The above example assumes that the user has all dependencies already built. The real power of CPP comes from the fact that, when a suitable version of a dependency is not found, CPP can automatically build and manage that dependency. As an example assume that our above project uses the popular C++ unit testing framework, Catch2. The above example becomes:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION <cmake_version>)
project(<project_name> VERSION <project_version>)
find_package(cpp REQUIRED)

cpp_find_or_build_dependency(NAME Catch2 URL https://github.com/catchorg/Catch2)

cpp_add_executable(
    <program_name>
    SOURCES <list_of_source_files>
    DEPENDS Catch2::Catch2
)
cpp_install(TARGETS <program_name>)

For more details consult the documentation.

Building CPP

Full instructions for building CPP can be found in the the documentation. For convenience, in a Unix-like setting, the following will suffice to build and install CPP:

git clone https://github.com/CMakePackagingProject/CMakePackagingProject.git
cd CMakePackagingProject
cmake -H. -Bbuild -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<where/to/install>
cd build
#May need to run the following with admin privileges depending on where you said
#to install
cmake --build . --target install