1. Introduction
CMake is a cross-platform build system generator. Projects specify their build process with platform-independent CMake listfiles included in each directory of a source tree with the name CMakeLists.txt. Users build a project by using CMake to generate a build system for a native tool on their platform.
2. Using CMake with executables
Lets assume we have a simple app with a single .c file.
We by creating a CMakeLists.txt file in the root of our project.
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
project(app_project)
add_executable(myapp main.c)
install(TARGETS myapp DESTINATION bin)
add_executable:defines our binary with all linked source files. (针对 c/cpp 文件，生成可执行 bin 文件)install:tells cmake to install our binary into thebindirectory of the install directory.
3. Building
CMake supports out-of-source builds — so all our compiled code goes into a directory separate to the sources.
To start a build we create a new folder:
mkdir _build
cd _build
And call cmake with the path to the project’s root (in this case the parent folder):
cmake ..
By default cmake will install our build into the system directories.
To define a custom install directory we simply pass -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX to cmake:
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../_install
To run the build script you can simply use the Makefile:
make
make install
We can now run our binary from the install directory:
../_install/bin/myapp
If we wanted to use a different generator we pass it to cmake using the -G parameter:
cmake .. -GXcode
4. Building library
Building our own library. Use add_library.
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
project(libtest_project)
add_library(test STATIC test.c)
install(TARGETS test DESTINATION lib)
install(FILES test.h DESTINATION include)
CMake will build the library as libtest.a and install it into lib folder of the install directory.