Modern C++ Template

A quick C++ template for modern CMake projects, aimed to be an easy to use starting point.

This is my personal take on such a type of template, thus I might not use the best practices or you might disagree with how I do things. Any and all feedback is greatly appreciated!

Features

• Modern CMake configuration and project, which, to the best of my knowledge, uses the best practices,

• An example of a Clang-Format config, inspired from the base Google model, with minor tweaks. This is aimed only as a starting point, as coding style is a subjective matter, everyone is free to either delete it (for the LLVM default) or supply their own alternative,

• Static analyzers integration, with Clang-Tidy and Cppcheck, the former being the default option,

• Doxygen support, through the ENABLE_DOXYGEN option, which you can enable if you wish to use it,

• Unit testing support, through GoogleTest (with an option to enable GoogleMock) or Catch2,

• Code coverage, enabled by using the ENABLE_CODE_COVERAGE option, through Codecov CI integration,

• Package manager support, with Conan and Vcpkg, through their respective options

• CI workflows for Windows, Linux and MacOS using GitHub Actions, making use of the caching features, to ensure minimum run time,

• .md templates for: README, Contributing Guideliness, Issues and Pull Requests,

• Options to build as a header-only library or executable, not just a static or shared library.

• Ccache integration, for speeding up rebuild times

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

• CMake v3.15+ - found at https://cmake.org/

• C++ Compiler - needs to support at least the C++17 standard, i.e. MSVC, GCC, Clang

Note: You also need to be able to provide CMake a supported generator.

Installing

Run the install target with CMake. For example:

cmake --build build --target install --config Release

# a more general syntax for that command is:
cmake --build <build_directory> --target install --config <desired_config>

Building the project

To build the project, all you need to do, after correctly installing the project, is run a similar CMake routine to the the one below:

mkdir build/ && cd build/
cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/absolute/path/to/custom/install/directory
cmake --build . --target install

Note: The custom CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX can be omitted if you wish to install in the default install location.

More options that you can set for the project can be found in the cmake/StandardSettings.cmake file. For certain options additional configuration may be needed in their respective *.cmake files (i.e. Conan needs the CONAN_REQUIRES and might need the CONAN_OPTIONS to be setup for it work correctly; the two are set in the cmake/Conan.cmake file).

Generating the documentation

In order to generate documentation for the project, you need to configure the build to use Doxygen. This is easily done, by modifying the workflow shown above as follows:

mkdir build/ && cd build/
cmake .. -D<project_name>_ENABLE_DOXYGEN=1 -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/absolute/path/to/custom/install/directory
cmake --build . --target doxygen-docs

Note: This will generate a docs/ directory in the project's root directory.

Running the tests

By default, the template uses Google Test for unit testing. Unit testing can be disabled in the options, by setting the ENABLE_UNIT_TESTING (from cmake/StandardSettings.cmake) to be false. To run the tests, simply use CTest, from the build directory, passing the desire configuration for which to run tests for. An example of this procedure is:

cd build          # if not in the build directory already
ctest -C Release  # or `ctest -C Debug` or any other configuration you wish to test

# you can also run tests with the `-VV` flag for a more verbose output (i.e.
#GoogleTest output as well)

End to end tests

If applicable, should be presented here.

Coding style tests

If applicable, should be presented here.