Basic CMake configuration files

To configure and check all the required dependencies of our project, we are going to use CMake; but it is not mandatory, so we can configure our project in any other tool or IDE such as Makefiles or Visual Studio. However, CMake is the most portable way to configure multiplatform C++ projects.

CMake uses configuration files called CMakeLists.txt, where the compilation and dependency processes are defined. For a basic project, based on an executable build from one source code file, a two-line CMakeLists.txt file is all that is needed. The file looks like this:

cmake_minimum_required (VERSION 2.6)
project (CMakeTest)
add_executable(${PROJECT_NAME} main.cpp)

The first line defines the minimum version of CMake required. This line is mandatory in our CMakeLists.txt file and allows you to use the cmake functionality defined from a given version defined in the second line; it defines the project name. This name is saved in a variable called PROJECT_NAME.

The last line creates an executable command (add_executable()) in the main.cpp file, gives it the same name as our project (${PROJECT_NAME}), and compiles our source code into an executable called CMakeTest, which we set as the project name.

The ${} expression allows access to any variable defined in our environment. Then, we can use the ${PROJECT_NAME} variable as an executable output name.