My go-to setup for a C++ project (after Hanno Hildenbrandt and Richel Bilderbeek). It has two important features:
- It uses CMake to be able to build on multiple platforms
- It comes into two flavors, user and developer. The user-configuration does the minimum to give the user a working program. The developer-configuration also builds all the tests and downloads (with vcpkg) the necessary libraries (here Boost.Test) to do so.
This setup is intended for biologists who need C++ in their research (e.g. for simulation studies or fast implementations of some analytical pipelines). It is made to build command-line interface programs and does not use anything fancy like GPUs. As such, it is pretty basic, but it does the job for many straightforward applications. You can use this setup for your own program by simply downloading it and tweaking it to suit your needs. You may get rid of README.md and the doc/ folder, which only contain documentation for this repository, and write your own documentation instead.
Important: you will need to replace setupp with the name of your project wherever needed (most importantly in CMakeLists.txt but also in vcpkg.json if you use the developer build configuration, see below).
The following shows how to download this repository and build the program setupp according to the user configuration on different platforms. This should be the most common one or at least the one used by the end user who wishes to compile this code. It compiles the code in release mode with some optimization flags. However, during software development the developer may require a testing framework or to build in debug mode, which is much slower. For this there is the developer configuration, which downloads and installs the testing library Boost.Test via vcpkg (follow instructions here for that).
If you do not need the developer configuration at all, you may set CMakeLists.txt as CMakeLists_user.txt and get rid of CMakeLists_devel.txt, CMakeLists_user.txt, tests/ and vcpkg.json.
If you just want an ultra-basic user version of this setup check this page.
All of the build details should be saved in the ./build/ folder during the building process.
(Click here to build as developer.)
In the terminal:
git clone [email protected]:rscherrer/setupp.git
cd setupp
cp CMakeLists_user.txt CMakeLists.txt # user configuration
mkdir build && cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build .The executable setupp is built in ../bin/.
In the command prompt:
git clone git@github.com:rscherrer/setupp.git
cd setupp
copy CMakeLists_user.txt CMakeLists.txt :: user configuration
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config ReleaseThe executable setupp.exe is built in ../bin/.
(Click here to build on the Peregrine cluster --- replaced by Habrok in 2023.)
(Click here to build on the Habrok cluster.)
Many IDEs such as VisualStudio or XCode support CMake out of the box. "Open folder" should do the trick... You can use CMake to generate the input files for your favorite IDE too (here a MacOS example):
git clone [email protected]:rscherrer/setupp.git
cd setupp
cp CMakeLists_user.txt CMakeLists.txt # user configuration
mkdir build
cd build
# Generate VisualStudio project files
cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 ..
# Generate Xcode project files (Xcode must be installed)
cmake -G Xcode This will place the project files in ../build.
In all the examples above you will notice that we specify:
cp CMakeLists_user.txt CMakeLists.txtThis is to make sure to build the fast, optimized, release version of the program. This is important as the developer (debug) version is not optimized and requires extra libraries to run all the tests, so it should not be used by the user.