C Development Environment

Last updated: 8-13-23

Inspired and modified from this original blog article.

This is my common build environment setup for C development. This is designed to be ran on Apple Silicon (ARM64). You can change the build architecture by overriding the $ARCH value in the makefile.

The build in this repo builds with debug symbols to support debugging within your IDE such as VSCode (see section below). You can disable building with debug symbols by removing the LDFLAGS = -g option.

Additionally, I should also note this repository relies on clang and not gcc. Due to this, you must ensure you have installed clang via xcode developer tooling for Mac.

The core thing about this repo is that there is support to build, compile and develop against a Docker container that is pre-built with the required dependencies. This allows for a more portable and reproducible build environment indpendent of OS and architecture.

Caveats

• Debugging within the devcontainers environment is not setup yet. This is mostly not working at the moment because clang is not installed on the build image. You can still debug by using the setup referenced in .vscode/settings.json.

Building

Builds a Docker image of all necessary dependencies for compiling.

Note: This is compiled for amd64. If you're running on arm/apple silicon, you should ensure experimental build features are enabled on Docker and you're using virtualization with Rosetta to run the amd64 image.

make build-env

Run env

Runs the environment in which you would actively develop against and run unit tests.

make run-env

Run tests

Runs all unit tests and coverage checks within the ./test directory.

Note, this will only work if you have ceedling pre-installed on the host or if you are in the build container shell via make run-env.

make test

Run tests from Docker container

Runs all unit tests within the ./test directory. This is the same as make test but it automatically spawns a Docker container for you that includes all the test deps such as ceedling.

make test-docker

VSCode

Dev Containers

If you're using VSCode, you can install the dev containers extension to get a nice virtualized environment to work within when using Docker and VSCode together.

This is defined via the .devcontainer configuration at the root. VSCode should prompt you with a window to connect to the dev container env once the extension above is enabled.

Auto format on save

To get auto-formatting working, you must install this clang-format extension and the configuration within .vscode/settings.json will apply format on save.