I'm trying to migrate from Visual Studio towards Jetbrains' (awesome) CLion IDE which uses CMake to organize the projects.
Until now, the transition has been smooth: creating CMake projects and importing them into CLion is easy, and I can begin coding on one plateform then continue on another one without problems.
However, one aspect of Visual Studio that I couldn't find an equivalent to in CMake is property sheets: I use them mainly for holding the include directories' paths and the linking libs for libraries (i.e. one .vsprops
file for each library, e.g. OpenCV.vsprops
, Boost.vsprops
, etc.).
This way, in VS, I could share a library's .vsprops
file between different projects without having to configure the paths/libs each time.
Does CMake have a similar mechanism to Visual Studio's property sheets ? How is it possible to store a library's includes/libs in a CMake-parsable file then "import" it in CMakeLists.txt in order to link against the library ?
Basically, what I want to do is:
link_target_to_libs(myTarget "path/to/propertySheet1" "path/to/propertySheet2" ...)
.Since I really want to make the libraries' inclusion/linking into a one-line command, and as far as my (basic) knowledge of CMake goes, I think that some compromise should be made -- mainly sharing the target name's variable between CMakeLists.txt
and the "property sheets". So this is my solution... until someone proposes a simpler/cleaner one:
.cmake
text file,TARGET
-- designates the target (i.e. the first argument of add_executable()
),.cmake
file contains a call to target_include_directories(${TARGET} PRIVATE ${PATH_TO_INCLUDE_DIR})
and target_link_libraries(${TARGET} ${LIST_OF_LIBS})
,include("path/to/.cmake")
in CMakeLists.txt
.I have successfully built and executed a simple program that uses X11 and OpenCV with the following files:
x11.cmake
target_include_directories(${TARGET} PRIVATE "/usr/include/X11")
target_link_libraries(${TARGET} "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libX11.so")
opencv.cmake
# OpenCV-specific stuff
set(OpenCV_DIR "/PATH/TO/OPENCV/INSTALL/DIR/share/OpenCV") # path to OpenCVConfig.cmake
find_package(OpenCV REQUIRED)
# include path
target_include_directories(${TARGET} PRIVATE ${OpenCV_INCLUDE_DIRS})
# linking libs
target_link_libraries(${TARGET} opencv_world opencv_ts)
CMakeLists.txt
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.4)
project(hello_clion)
set(CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS "${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS} -std=c++11")
## hello-clion ##############################
# make a new target name
set(TARGET hello-clion)
# find sources
file(GLOB_RECURSE SOURCE_FILES "src/*.cpp" "src/*.hpp")
# declare a target
add_executable(${TARGET} ${SOURCE_FILES})
# link the libraries (to the last-declared ${TARGET}, which should be the last-added executable)
include("x11.cmake")
include("opencv.cmake")
#############################################
main.cpp
#include <cstdio>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <cstring>
#include <thread>
#include <opencv2/opencv.hpp>
#include <Xlib.h>
int main_x11()
{
// adapted from: http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Window_creation/X11#Xlib
}
int main_ocv()
{
// adapted from: http://docs.opencv.org/doc/tutorials/introduction/display_image/display_image.html#source-code
}
int main()
{
using namespace std;
thread tocv(main_ocv);
thread tx11(main_x11);
tocv.join();
tx11.join();
return 0;
}
Now, each time I want to use OpenCV in a project/program, I just have to put include("opencv.cmake")
in the corresponding CMakeLists.txt
.