A Simple CMake Template Project

This is a very simple, bare-bones cmake project template.

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This project was originally created by me to learn about the cmake build system. A lot of cmake resources that I've looked into just seem very tedious and boring. My original sentiment was something along the lines of, "I just want to start coding, I don't care about any of this..."

So this template is just here to serve as a bare bones starting point, to get you up and running with a very simple project structure with some template cmake and cpp files included as examples.

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• Build Instructions

1. Clone Repository:

   git clone https://github.com/mdmubin/cmake-template.git
   

2. Open clone directory, create build directory and change current directory to build directory:

   cd cmake-template
   mkdir build
   cd build
   

3. Configure cmake:

   cmake ..
   

4. Build project:

• debug mode

  cmake --build . --config Debug
  

• release mode

  cmake --build . --config Release
  

I am using MSVC compiler and for me the executable/library file built by cmake is present in ../project-root/build/src/[Debug or Release]/. If you are using a different compiler, you might not find it in the same directory as I did.

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• Directory Structure:

  This is just a directory structure that I personally think manages to arrange every file in a neat manner.

project_root/
  |---> build/
  |       |---> (cmake files are built in this directory)
  |
  |---> external/
  |       |---> include/ (external include headers)
  |       |---> libs/ (external library files, for example: .lib, .dll, etc)
  |
  |---> src/
  |       |---> include/ (public headers for your library goes here)
  |       |---> ... (any source files, for example: .cpp, .c, .h, .hpp, etc)
  |       |---> CMakeLists.txt
  |
  |---> test/
  |       |---> ... (test source files)
  |       |---> CMakeLists.txt
  |
  |---> .gitignore
  |---> CMakeLists.txt
  |---> LICENCE.txt
  |---> README.md

• List of useful CMake resources

  • CMake Official Documentation
  • How to Make CMake Good - Video Series
  • Modern CMake
  • Modern CPP Starter

• I plan to add a simple cmake test, as soon as I learn more about it