C++ Project Generator

This is primarily for personal use, though feel free to use it youself as well.

Often when creating new C++ projects, I would end up copy and pasting CMakeLists.txt files and build scripts, manually having to change project names and other mundane activies. To mitigate this issue, I created this project, which would create these project files for me.

Building

On linux

sh build.sh release

Configuartion

Setting up

The project makes some assumptions about your C++ workspace structure:

For example, on my system, I have this:

├── cpp
    └── cpp-project-generator

My C++ projects are in the cpp directory, and the project generator is in the cpp/cpp-project-generator directory.

To create the generator, cd into cpp-project-generator and run:

sh install.sh

After building, your cpp-projects folder will have the following structure:

└── cpp-projects
    ├── new.py
    ├── cpp-project-generator
    └── templates
        ├── _common
        ├── _deps
        ├── opengl
        ├── sfml
        └── terminal

This created added the new.py script, which can be used to create projects.

It also created a templates directory. This is where scripts for your new projects will be copied from, as well as where the project template layouts are stored. For example, SFML projects use the layout from the templates/sfml folder, and then copy the scripts into a scripts folder. More info in text section.

The scripts:

• build.sh - Used to build your projects. Use build.sh release to build in release mode.
• run.sh - Used to run your projects. Use run.sh release to run in release mode.
• debug.sh - Used to run GDB to debug your project.

Using

To use, cd to your cpp folder and then:

python3 new.py <Project type> <Project name>

• Project type: The project template to use, eg terminal or sfml. This can be any directory in the projects/ folder
• Project name: The name of the project to create, eg my-app

EG

python3 new.py terminal my-app

Adding new templates

To add a template, simply create a folder in the cpp-project-generator/templates/ directory, inside including all the files you need for that template.

You must provide a CMakeLists file, where the project name is , which this program will auto replace with the name chosen on project create.

Rerun sh install.sh to update the templates folder in the cpp directory.

Example usage

python3 new.py terminal my-app

This will create a project folder cpp/my-app/ with the structure

└── my-app
    ├── CMakeLists.txt
    ├── scripts
    │   ├── build.sh
    │   ├── debug.sh
    │   └── run.sh
    └── src
        └── main.cpp

After doing cd to the directory, it can then be built and ran:

./scripts/build.sh
./scripts/run.sh

After the build stage, it creates the following structure:

└── my-app
    ├── bin
    │   ├── debug
    │   │   ├── CMakeCache.txt
    │   │   ├── CMakeFiles
    │   │   ├── cmake_install.cmake
    │   │   ├── Makefile
    │   │   └── new
    │   └── release
    ├── CMakeLists.txt
    ├── scripts
    │   ├── build.sh
    │   ├── debug.sh
    │   └── run.sh
    └── src
        └── main.cpp

Where the target was built in the bin/debug/ directory.

To build and run in release mode, use the release argument:

./scripts/build.sh release
./scripts/run.sh release