How to 'install' and use in-house dependencies for other projects with CMake

clarification: If the below setup is a reasaonable way to do it, then my question is mainly, how do I best add the public headers with the .lib when I run ninja install as my solution does not do this currently.

There is a myriad of examples of how to do stuff in different ways, and many seem to contradict eachother to just confuse me even more.

I'm trying to change out a in-house build system and replace it with CMake. The codebase consists of many different components/libraries, like OS/Platform abstraction, networking, functionality etc. Before this was always compiled together as one big codebase, so running clean would remove everything and rebuild all dependencies.

Now it comes to the part where I have trouble understanding on how a modern smart way to do it in CMake is.

Ignoring the fact that a dependency-chain tool on top is needed, my idea was to build the components/libraries in order of libraries with no dependency to the topmost as isolated build runs. Then each isolated build run would be built with its dependencies, like only the windows API for the OS abstraction library, and then run install and export on it.

Is this the general prefered way, to compile a library to a .lib on windows or .a on linux and export it to a known shared location?
Im guessing it would be required then to copy all public header files for this library to the same location? If so, how is this most correctly done?

If I have my OS abstraction folder structure

OSabstraction/
  includes/
    OSabstraction/
        abstraction.h
  src/
    abstraction.cpp
  CMakeLists.txt

and my CMakeLists is

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.12)
project(OSabstraction LANGUAGES CXX)

add_library(abstraction)

target_sources(abstraction
    PRIVATE
        src/abstraction.cpp
)
target_include_directories(abstraction
    PUBLIC
    $<BUILD_INTERFACE:${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/includes/>
    $<INSTALL_INTERFACE:include>
)

install(
    TARGETS abstraction
    EXPORT abstraction-export
    ARCHIVE DESTINATION lib
)

How would I best go around to use this library in many other inhouse projects? This library is in practice many times larger, so what would be the correct way to do it for a large project?

edit: I tried to follow Pablo Arias' guide on how to do CMake Right, but I am not sure how the build_interface and install_interface generators work in regards to getting my header files with the export of the .lib file.

Solution

Recommended solution is to use a package manager together with CMake. The link below is a full C++ project setup template which can use the package manager https://conan.io/ to support splitting up dependencies into individual libraries.

https://github.com/trondhe/cmake_template