I have a c++ project with a couple of executables set up with cmake. The usual workflow is to install all 3rdparty dependencies via package manager, build and install a package via cpack on that same machine. Now, I would like to include all runtime dependencies in that package to be able to install it on another machine without needing to install 3rdparty dependencies there like on the build machine.
I did lot's of research on the web - without much success. I found something called BundleUtilities for cmake but couldn't find any entry-friendly documentation about it. I don't even know if it does what I need.
I would like to use cmake's benefits and generate such a "bundled" package without any manual intervention or anything. I do not want to assemble and copy 3rdparty dependencies manually. Ideal would be a clean cmake/cpack solution for the problem.
Edit:
To clarify: The target machine in question has no internet connection.
Are you really sure you want to do this? It probably won't turn out to be a great idea... packaging third party tools is effectively assuming responsibility for third party software, and as the upstream version inevitably gets out ahead of what people are finding in your tarballs that can become a real headache. Consider whether you're really ok with seeing version conflicts because your dependencies are installed.
Why not just have cmake call out to the system's package manager at config time? The exec_process() command will run console commands for you.
Related
I am very much confused between these two terms Build tools and Package Manager. According to my current knowledge, Package managers are the ones use to install dependencies required for the code to execute while Build tools are used to Package the code plus dependencies into single file i.e. building the code. Building our application will enable to make it production ready.
Am I right???
Short answer
Build systems/tools manage your compilation requirements.
Package managers/tools manager your library requirements.
A build tool may have integrated package management.
For example, in both C++ and Java you can directly call the compiler and provide all the include, source and library paths manually or you can use a build system (make/cmake... for c++, maven/gradle/ant... for java).
When you link external libraries with your build system it will do its best to find them in its search path, and will link with the first version that meets its requirements or tell you that it couldn't find it. Adding libraries manually is fairly easy, but sometimes each library you add will require another library with it.
A package manager would make sure that your libraries are downloaded, are the right version, and all the libraries they depend on are downloaded. some examples are maven and gradle which have integrated package managment for java, and conan is a fairly popular option to combine with cmake.
So ideally you would use both, but it can be more work setting them up than you save not doing things manually. It depends on your programming language, if you need multiple versions of something, and your OS.
I'm relatively new to Conan. I'm trying to use packages provided by conan in a very natural cmake way...i.e. I don't want anything conan specific in the consuming library's CMakeLists.txt. I just want to find_package my dependency, target_link_libraries to it, and move on just like I could pre-conan. If the dependency did their cmake correctly, all transitive dependencies are handled automagically. Per this blog article: https://blog.conan.io/2018/06/11/Transparent-CMake-Integration.html it seems the way to do this is using the cmake_paths generator. I can make and consume packages with that generator no problem.
I'm now trying to comsume a number of third party libraries, namely grpc, yaml-cpp, and Catch2, however none of those packages work with the cmake_paths generator because as part of their package recipe they explicitly delete the cmake package configuration files.
See
https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/ce2f6b89606cc582ccabbb5420f18a29e705dae3/recipes/grpc/all/conanfile.py#L171
https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/ce2f6b89606cc582ccabbb5420f18a29e705dae3/recipes/catch2/2.x.x/conanfile.py#L97
https://github.com/conan-io/conan-center-index/blob/ce2f6b89606cc582ccabbb5420f18a29e705dae3/recipes/yaml-cpp/all/conanfile.py#L95-L96
I obviously haven't done an exhaustive search to see how many packages do this, I just find it hard to believe it's just a coincidence that the three libraries I want to pull in first are the only three that do this.
Is there a reason this is done? or is this a hold-over from times before the cmake_paths generator was a thing and should now be considered a bug?
In the blog article about transparent cmake integration, it states that one of the downsides of the cmake_paths generator is that transitive dependency information is not propagated, but the only reason I can see that would be is because the CMake config modules are deleted as shown above--a major feature of what cmake does (especially modern CMake) is to manage those transitive dependencies. Why does conan seem to want to throw that information away?
The reasons why ConanCenter (not Conan, this is only a requirement of public packages in ConanCenter) is removing the packaged findxxx.cmake or xxxx-config.cmake files from packages are:
Packages from ConanCenter should work from any other build system, not only CMake. Even if CMake is now used by a majority of devs (some surveys shows around 50-55%), there are still a lot of people using other build systems, MSBuild, Meson, Autotools, ec. Conan defines the information for consumers in its package_info() method, which is an abstraction that will work for any consumer build system. When this was not mandatory in ConanCenter, it resulted in many packages that only worked for CMake.
It happens that some of the packaged cmake files can be problematic, and depending on how they are generated, they will not handle transitive dependencies as expected, and they can find transitive dependencies in the system instead of other Conan packages. This happens sometimes when an open source library doesn't have a modern and correct CMakeLists.txt and locates some dependencies in the system directly. Unfortunately the quality of CMakeLists.txt files out there is varying and they not always follow best practices.
Conan handles binary configuration separately, to scale to support many different binary configurations (for example ConanCenter builds around 130 different binaries for each package version), so for example the Debug and Release packages are in separate locations. The native find_package() CMake files cannot handle this situation, so all users expecting to have multi-config setup (like Visual Studio and Xcode) will not manage to achieve this without the Conan generated .cmake files.
Again, this only applies to ConanCenter packages, because ConanCenter is trying to be as universal as possible (to support fairly all build systems) and to allow multi-configuration setups, while being as robust as possible given the complexities of the diverse ecosystem.
In any case, the modern CMakeDeps and CMakeToolchain experimental generators will achieve a transparent integration, they are already released in latest Conan 1.X and as those will be the ones that will survive in next 2.0, it is recommended to start trying them soon.
I'm a DevOps engineer creating CI processes for projects. I was wondering what is the best way to deal with the following scenario: Let's say I have a C++ project (using CLion + CMake) with several developers working on it. Now in order to be built, the project has some libraries it depends on. That automatically reflects on the CMakeLists.txt file that should know where to look for those libraries.
Basically the problem is that we need to take care that every developer has these libraries in the correct paths on his machine, which is a big hassle.
One approach to handle this would be to keep those dependencies in the repository. That's great since all the developer has to do is to clone the repo and he got everything he needs in order to run compilation. But as we know, keeping binaries in SCM is not a good practice.
The question is, is there a good method to handle project dependencies in a C++ project?
I know that with C# for example, we could use NuGet packages to handle these kind of scenarios. So we'd have a NuGet repository in Artifactory that would host the dependency packages, and then in our project we'd keep a reference to the required packages, and in build time we would just download the dependecies and build the project.
Is there something alike in C++ (Running on Linux I mean)?
Hope the question is clear enough lol, had a hard time wording it..
It depends on how those dependencies are delivered and packaged. If whoever maintains your dependencies took CMake into account you can probably use find_package. If they didn't account for this, but they support pkg-config you can use FindPkgConfig. Now all you need to do is let the developers know what dependencies they need to install. This should work regardless of the OS used for development.
Other solutions may involve pulling and building the dependency code when you build your project (for example, by using git submodules if possible, or FetchContent, but this can become a nightmare if you have a lot of dependencies).
Additionally, you can try using a package manager like vcpkg, or conan (if all your dependencies are available there), or CPM.
I am making a modified C++ compiler and I have it built and tested locally. However, I would like to be able to package my build for Windows, Linux (Debian), and Mac OSX.
All of the instructions I can find online deal with building gcc but have no regard for making something distributable (or perhaps I am missing something?). I know for Windows I will need to bundle MinGW somehow, but that only further confuses me - and I have no idea how well Mac works with GCC these days..
Can anyone layout a set of discrete high-level steps I could try on each system so I can allow people to install my modified compiler easily?
First make sure your project installs well including executables, headers, runtime dependencies. If you're using something like cmake, this is a matter of installing things to CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX while possibly appending GnuInstallDirs. If you are using make, then you need to ensure that make install --prefix=... works well.
From here, you can target each platform independently. Treat the packaging independently from your project. Like Chipster mentioned, making rpm files isn't so tough. deb files for Debian-based OSs, tar.xz files for Arch-based OSs are similar. The rules for creating these packages can use your install rules to create the package. You mentioned mingw. If you're targeting an msys distribution of mingw for Windows deployment, then the Arch-based packaging of pacman will work on msys as well. You can slowly work on supporting one-platform at a time with almost no changes to your actual project.
Typically in the open-source world, people will release a tar.gz file supporting ./configure && make && make install or similar. Then someone associated with the platform (like a Debian-developer) will find your project, make some packaging rules for it, and release it into their distribution. That means your project can be totally agnostic to where it's being release. It also means you don't really need to worry about MacOS yet, you can wait until you have someone who wants it there, or some hardware to test it on.
If you really want to be in control of how things are packaged for each platform from inside of your project, and you are already using cmake, cpack is a great tool which helps out. After writing cpack rules for your project, you can simply type cpack to generate many types of deployable archives. You won't get the resulting *.deb file into Debian or Ubuntu official archives, but at least people can using those formats can install your package.
Also, consider releasing one package with the runtime libraries, and one with the development content (headers, compiler, static libraries). This way, if someone uses your compiler, they can re-distribute the runtime libraries which is probably going to be a much simpler install.
I'm in the middle of setting up an build environment for a c++ game project. Our main requirement is the ability to build not just our game code, but also its dependencies (Ogre3D, Cegui, boost, etc.). Furthermore we would like to be able build on Linux as well as on Windows as our development team consists of members using different operating systems.
Ogre3D uses CMake as its build tool. This is why we based our project on CMake too so far. We can compile perfectly fine once all dependencies are set up manually on each team members system as CMake is able to find the libraries.
The Question is if there is an feasible way to get the dependencies set up automatically. As a Java developer I know of Maven, but what tools do exist in the world of c++?
Update: Thanks for the nice answers and links. Over the next few days I will be trying out some of the tools to see what meets our requirements, starting with CMake. I've indeed had my share with autotools so far and as much as I like the documentation (the autobook is a very good read), I fear autotools are not meant to be used on Windows natively.
Some of you suggested to let some IDE handle the dependency management. We consist of individuals using all possible technologies to code from pure Vim to fully blown Eclipse CDT or Visual Studio. This is where CMake allows use some flexibility with its ability to generate native project files.
In the latest CMake 2.8 version there is the new ExternalProject module.
This allows to download/checkout code, configure and build it as part of your main build tree.
It should also allow to set dependencies.
At my work (medical image processing group) we use CMake to build all our own libraries and applications. We have an in-house tool to track all the dependencies between projects (defined in a XML database). Most of the third party libraries (like Boost, Qt, VTK, ITK etc..) are build once for each system we support (MSWin32, MSWin64, Linux32 etc..) and are commited as zip-files in the version control system. CMake will then extract and configure the correct zip file depending on which system the developer is working on.
I have been using GNU Autotools (Autoconf, Automake, Libtool) for the past couple of months in several projects that I have been involved in and I think it works beautifully. Truth be told it does take a little bit to get used to the syntax, but I have used it successfully on a project that requires the distribution of python scripts, C libraries, and a C++ application. I'll give you some links that helped me out when I first asked a similar question on here.
The GNU Autotools Page provides the best documentation on the system as a whole but it is quite verbose.
Wikipedia has a page which explains how everything works. Autoconf configures the project based upon the platform that you are about to compile on, Automake builds the Makefiles for your project, and Libtool handles libraries.
A Makefile.am example and a configure.ac example should help you get started.
Some more links:
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~adl/autotools.html
http://www.developingprogrammers.com/index.php/2006/01/05/autotools-tutorial/
http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/
One thing that I am not certain on is any type of Windows wrapper for GNU Autotools. I know you are able to use it inside of Cygwin, but as for actually distributing files and dependencies on Windows platforms you are probably better off using a Windows MSI installer (or something that can package your project inside of Visual Studio).
If you want to distribute dependencies you can set them up under a different subdirectory, for example, libzip, with a specific Makefile.am entry which will build that library. When you perform a make install the library will be installed to the lib folder that the configure script determined it should use.
Good luck!
There are several interesting make replacements that automatically track implicit dependencies (from header files), are cross-platform and can cope with generated files (e.g. shader definitions). Two examples I used to work with are SCons and Jam/BJam.
I don't know of a cross-platform way of getting *make to automatically track dependencies.
The best you can do is use some script that scans source files (or has C++ compiler do that) and finds #includes (conditional compilation makes this tricky) and generates part of makefile.
But you'd need to call this script whenever something might have changed.
The Question is if there is an feasible way to get the dependencies set up automatically.
What do you mean set up?
As you said, CMake will compile everything once the dependencies are on the machines. Are you just looking for a way to package up the dependency source? Once all the source is there, CMake and a build tool (gcc, nmake, MSVS, etc.) is all you need.
Edit: Side note, CMake has the file command which can be used to download files if they are needed: file(DOWNLOAD url file [TIMEOUT timeout] [STATUS status] [LOG log])
Edit 2: CPack is another tool by the CMake guys that can be used to package up files and such for distribution on various platforms. It can create NSIS for Windows and .deb or .tgz files for *nix.
At my place of work (we build embedded systems for power protection) we used CMake to solve the problem. Our setup allows cmake to be run from various locations.
/
CMakeLists.txt "install precompiled dependencies and build project"
project/
CMakeLists.txt "build the project managing dependencies of subsystems"
subsystem1/
CMakeLists.txt "build subsystem 1 assume dependecies are already met"
subsystem2/
CMakeLists.txt "build subsystem 2 assume dependecies are already met"
The trick is to make sure that each CMakeLists.txt file can be called in isolation but that the top level file can still build everything correctly. Technically we don't need the sub CMakeLists.txt files but it makes the developers happy. It would be an absolute pain if we all had to edit one monolithic build file at the root of the project.
I did not set up the system (I helped but it is not my baby). The author said that the boost cmake build system had some really good stuff in it, that help him get the whole thing building smoothly.
On many *nix systems, some kind of package manager or build system is used for this. The most common one for source stuff is GNU Autotools, which I've heard is a source of extreme grief. However, with a few scripts and an online depository for your deps you can set up something similar like so:
In your project Makefile, create a target (optionally with subtargets) that covers your dependencies.
Within the target for each dependency, first check to see if the dep source is in the project (on *nix you can use touch for this, but you could be more thorough)
If the dep is not there, you can use curl, etc to download the dep
In all cases, have the dep targets make a recursive make call (make; make install; make clean; etc) to the Makefile (or other configure script/build file) of the dependency. If the dep is already built and installed, make will return fairly promptly.
There are going to be lots of corner cases that will cause this to break though, depending on the installers for each dep (perhaps the installer is interactive?), but this approach should cover the general idea.
Right now I'm working on a tool able to automatically install all dependencies of a C/C++ app with exact version requirement :
compiler
libs
tools (cmake, autotools)
Right now it works, for my app. (Installing UnitTest++, Boost, Wt, sqlite, cmake all in correct order)
The tool, named «C++ Version Manager» (inspired by the excellent ruby version manager), is coded in bash and hosted on github : https://github.com/Offirmo/cvm
Any advices and suggestions are welcomed.