CGold: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the CMake

Warning

The project is not under active development

Welcome to CGold!

This guide will show you how to use CMake and will help you to write elegant, correct and scalable projects. We’ll start from the simple cases and add more features one by one. This tutorial covers only part of the CMake capabilities - some topics are skipped intentionally in favor of better modern approaches [1]. This document is designed to be a good tutorial for absolute beginners but also touches on some aspects in which advanced developers may be interested. Look at this document as a skeleton/starting point for further CMake learning.

Enjoy!

• 1. Overview
  • 1.1. What CMake can do
  • 1.2. What can’t be done with CMake
• 2. First step
  • 2.1. CMake Installation
  • 2.2. Native build tool
  • 2.3. Compiler
  • 2.4. Minimal example
  • 2.5. Generate native tool files
  • 2.6. Build and run executable
• 3. Tutorials
  • 3.1. CMake stages
  • 3.2. Out-of-source build
  • 3.3. Workflow
  • 3.4. Version and policies
  • 3.5. Project declaration
  • 3.6. Variables
  • 3.7. CMake listfiles
  • 3.8. Control structures
  • 3.9. Executables
  • 3.10. Tests
  • 3.11. Libraries
  • 3.12. Pseudo targets
  • Collecting sources
  • 3.13. Usage requirements
  • 3.14. Build types
  • 3.15. configure_file
  • 3.16. Install
  • 3.17. Toolchain
  • 3.18. Generator expressions
  • 3.19. Properties
  • 3.20. Packing
  • 3.21. Continuous integration
• 4. Platforms
  • 4.1. iOS
  • 4.2. Android
• 5. Generators
  • 5.1. Ninja
• 6. Compilers

[1]	See rejected section for list with detailed description