Table Of Contents

Previous topic

Quickstart

Next topic

Build Variants

This Page

Configuring the buildspace

Setting the compiler

See Advanced options below.

Configuration tools

Included in the standard cmake distribution are the Windows CMake gui and the unix ccmake curses interface, which allow one to configure various aspects of the cmake build. On Microsoft Windows run the CMake configuration program from the Start menu. On unix, run

ccmake <path-to-source>

where ccmake will be in CMake’s binary directory. If you have not yet run cmake in this directory, you will see an empty list of options:

                                                     Page 0 of 1
 EMPTY CACHE

EMPTY CACHE:
Press [enter] to edit option         CMake Version 2.6 - patch 0
Press [c] to configure
Press [h] for help         Press [q] to quit without generating
Press [t] to toggle advanced mode (Currently Off)

After pressing c to configure, (or if you’ve run cmake already), You will be presented with a list of editable build options something like this:

 BUILD_BOOST_DATE_TIME            ON
 BUILD_BOOST_FILESYSTEM           ON
 BUILD_BOOST_GRAPH                ON
 BUILD_BOOST_IOSTREAMS            ON
 BUILD_BOOST_PROGRAM_OPTIONS      ON
 BUILD_BOOST_PYTHON               ON
 BUILD_BOOST_REGEX                ON
 BUILD_BOOST_SERIALIZATION        ON
 BUILD_BOOST_SIGNALS              ON
 BUILD_BOOST_TEST                 ON
 BUILD_BOOST_THREAD               ON
 BUILD_BOOST_WAVE                 ON
 BUILD_BOOST_WSERIALIZATION       ON
 BUILD_DEBUG                      ON
 BUILD_MULTI_THREADED             ON
 BUILD_RELEASE                    ON
 BUILD_SHARED                     ON
 BUILD_SINGLE_THREADED            ON
 BUILD_STATIC                     ON
 BUILD_TESTING                    OFF
 BUILD_VERSIONED                  ON
 CMAKE_BACKWARDS_COMPATIBILITY    2.4
 CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE
 CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX             /usr/local
 DEBUG_COMPILE_FLAGS              -g
 EXECUTABLE_OUTPUT_PATH
 LIBRARY_OUTPUT_PATH
 PYTHON_EXECUTABLE                /usr/bin/python2.4
 PYTHON_INCLUDE_PATH              /usr/include/python2.4
 PYTHON_LIBRARY                   /usr/lib/python2.4/config/libpython2.4.so
 RELEASE_COMPILE_FLAGS            -O3 -DNDEBUG


BUILD_VERSIONED: Use versioned library names, e.g., boost_filesystem-gcc41-1_34
Press [enter] to edit option                        CMake Version 2.4 - patch 5
Press [c] to configure     Press [g] to generate and exit
Press [h] for help         Press [q] to quit without generating
Press [t] to toggle advanced mode (Currently Off)

Use the arrow keys to select particular options. Press c (for (c)onfigure) to perform the preliminary configuration of the CMake build system when you are done. When the options you have selected have stabilized, CMake will give you the (g)enerate option. If you do not see this option, press c again to reconfigure. Try the t key to see more options. When you’re done press g to generate makefiles and exit.

CMakeCache.txt

The same information is stored in a file CMakeCache.txt located in the build directory. For this reason, after you’ve done the initial configuration of a build directory you can invoke ccmake like this:

ccmake <path-to-build>

or have the makefiles do it for you:

make edit_cache

The CMakeCache.txt file is hand-editable, though this is usually not as convenient as the cmake-supplied configuration tools mentioned above. An excerpt of this file:

//
// Enable/Disable color output during build.
//
CMAKE_COLOR_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON

//
// Use versioned library names, e.g., boost_filesystem-gcc41-1_34
//
BUILD_VERSIONED:BOOL=ON

On unix, (?windows too?) the generated makefiles will detect if this file has been edited and will automatically rerun the makefile generation phase. If you should need to trigger this regeneration manually you may execute

make rebuild_cache

Useful options

More detail on some of these options is available elsewhere. But here is a summary:

BUILD_VERSIONED

Toggles mangling of compiler name and boost version into library names

BUILD_TESTING

Toggles build of regression tests

BUILD_feature

Toggles build of feature feature, where feature comes from the list found at FIXME, e.g. BUILD_RELEASE, BUILD_DEBUG, BUILD_MULTI_THREADED, etc.

BOOST_TEST_LIBRARIES

Semicolon-separated list of libraries to test. This option appears only if BUILD_TESTING is enabled. enabled.

CMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES

Mac OS X users: to build universal binaries, set this to
ppc;i386.

Advanced options

ccmake provides the keystroke option t which toggles advanced mode. Some of the useful options here are:

CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE

Displays full build commands during build. Good for debugging. Advanced option: use t to toggle display of this option and others. On unix, you can also build verbose by passing the command line option VERBOSE=1 to your make invocation.

CMAKE_CXX_COMPILER

Sets the compiler. If you have a nonstandard compiler and no default compiler, you may have to pass the value of this option on the commandline.