ProjectSetUpDemo

Just a minimal demo project to show case how to set up a C++ project that is being build with CMake, manages 3rd party dependencies with Conan and uses GitHub actions for CI integration.

Building the project

Presets

This project makes use of presets to simplify the process of configuring the project. As a developer, you are recommended to always have the latest CMake version installed to make use of the latest Quality-of-Life additions.

As a developer, you should create a CMakeUserPresets.json file at the root of the project:

{
  "version": 2,
  "cmakeMinimumRequired": {
    "major": 3,
    "minor": 14,
    "patch": 0
  },
  "configurePresets": [
    {
      "name": "dev-<os>",
      "hidden": true,
      "inherits": ["conan", "ci-<os>"],
      "cacheVariables": {
        "CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE": "Debug",
        "CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS": "ON"
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "dev-debug",
      "binaryDir": "${sourceDir}/build/dev-debug",
      "inherits": "dev-<os>"
    },
    {
      "name": "dev-release",
      "binaryDir": "${sourceDir}/build/dev-release",
      "inherits": "dev-<os>",
      "cacheVariables": {
        "CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE": "Release"
      }
    }
  ],
  "buildPresets": [
    {
      "name": "dev-debug",
      "configurePreset": "dev-debug",
      "configuration": "Debug",
      "jobs": 4
    },
    {
      "name": "dev-release",
      "configurePreset": "dev-release",
      "configuration": "Release",
      "jobs": 4
    }
  ],
  "testPresets": [
    {
      "name": "dev-debug",
      "configurePreset": "dev-debug",
      "configuration": "Debug",
      "output": {
        "outputOnFailure": true
      },
      "execution": {
        "jobs": 4,
        "noTestsAction": "error"
      }
    },
    {
      "name": "dev-release",
      "configurePreset": "dev-release",
      "configuration": "Release",
      "output": {
        "outputOnFailure": true
      },
      "execution": {
        "jobs": 4,
        "noTestsAction": "error"
      }
    }
  ]
}

You should replace <os> in your newly created presets file with the name of the operating system you have, which may be win64, linux or darwin. You can see what these correspond to in the CMakePresets.json file.

CMakeUserPresets.json is also the perfect place in which you can put all sorts of things that you would otherwise want to pass to the configure command in the terminal.

Dependency manager

The above preset will make use of the conan dependency manager. After installing it, download the dependencies and generate the necessary CMake files by running this command in the project root:

conan install . -s build_type=<built_type> -b missing

You should replace <build_type> with either Debug or Release depending what configuration you want to build.

Note that if your conan profile does not specify the same compiler used by CMake, then that could potentially cause issues. See the conan docs on profiles.

Configure, build and test

If you followed the above instructions, then you can configure, build and test the project respectively with the following commands from the project root on any operating system with any build system:

cmake --preset=dev-<built_type>
cmake --build --preset=dev-<built_type>
ctest --preset=dev-<built_type>

You should replace <build_type> with either debug or release depending what configuration you want to build.

If you are using a compatible editor (e.g. VSCode) or IDE (e.g. CLion, VS), you will also be able to select the above created user presets for automatic integration.

Please note that both the build and test commands accept a -j flag to specify the number of jobs to use, which should ideally be specified to the number of threads your CPU has. You may also want to add that to your preset using the jobs property, see the presets documentation for more details.