I'm trying to install a C++ framework which has a pretty complicated installation process since a binary installer is not provided. Here is the link that shows the steps to take to install this framework. http://fw4spl.readthedocs.io/en/dev/Installation/src/WindowsInstall.html. I'm using Windows 10 if that helps.
I've been able to successfully follow the instructions (hopefully) until this part: Compile the FW4SPL dependencies with jom in the console (e.g. jom all, jom qt, etc). I don't really understand what I am expected to do and what cmd commands I am supposed to use to complete the installation. Also, I don't really understand why there are separate instructions for dependencies and source since they look exactly the same to me. Am I supposed to do both? Any help would be appreciated.
Compiling dependencies and source files are not the same since the instructions say that the fw4spl-deps folder must be built and compiled in the dependencies section, while the fw4spl folder must be built and compiled in the source section. You must have missed that the folder names were different: fw4spl-deps vs fw4spl. So you must do both.
"Compile dependencies in the console" means use the command prompt to compile the folder that was generated during the fw4spl-deps build. The building may be done with CMake for example as explained in the instructions.
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JetBrains has spoiled me. I'm familiar with the standard UNIX make file and the make, make install routine normally associated with installing software with traditional make files, but I'm not as familiar with cmake since CLion does it all for me.
I want to distribute my code to others and provide simple instructions for building it via cmake so that they have a binary they can execute. The official cmake tutorial shows writing install rules in the CMakeLists.txt file but it isn't clear if this is supported by CLion (or even if it needs to be).
For a simple, single-file (main.cpp) application, what would be an example of how to build it using cmake (assuming those it is distributed to don't have CLion nor use another IDE, they just want to build and use it)?
To build code that comes with a CMakeLists.txt file, you run cmake to generate a Makefile (or other build configuration file):
cmake <path_to_CMakeLists.txt>
Then you run
make;make install
as usual. (or as described in the comment, you can type cmake --build . instead of make - useful if you're on a platform with a different build system)
You don't want to check in the Makefile into your source control, though, as it needs to be generated on the computer that will actually be doing the building.
I'm very new to C++ world, so please, sorry for such a dummy question. I googled a little, but wasn't able to find a proper answer.
My question is fairly simple - how should I use libraries in C++ world. For example in Java - there is maven and gradle for this task. In Python - I use pip. In javascript npm and bower do all the stuff. In C# you use nuget or just adding DLL lib to your project. But looks like in C++ things isn't such easy.
I found a tool, called conan but amount of libraries they have is pretty small and does not include any what I'm looking for.
So, for example - I want to use nlp lib meta but it seems like they don't provide any installer files. So I assume I need to get sources from Github. Should I compile them and then try to add the compiled files to my project or do I need to have a lib folder in my project, and put meta's sources in those folder and after operate with meta's sources as they are in my project?
My question isn't about how to install specific meta lib, but more from the source management point of view. If I use Visual Studio on Windows for example, but my colleague will be coding Clion under Linux. And I don't know the proper way of managing dependencies in C++ world.
C++ doesn't have anything like pip or npm/bower. I don't know if maven or gradle can be persuaded to handle C++ libraries.
In general, you are going to have to end up with
Header files in a directory somewhere
library files (either static libraries, or DLLs/shared objects). If the library is a header-only library like some of the boost libraries, then you won't need this.
You get hold of the library files, either by building them on your machine (typical for open source projects, and projects aimed at Linux platforms), or by downloading the pre-compiled binaries (typical for Windows libraries, particularly paid-for).
Hopefully, the instructions for building the library will be included on the library website. As noted in the comments, 'meta' seems to be quite good at that.
When you try to compile with the library, you may need a command line option (eg -I) to specify the directory containing the header files, and you may need a linker option (eg -l) to tell the linker to link against your library.
Cget will install any package that uses standard cmake, and works for linux and windows. It has shorten syntax for getting packages directly from github(such as cget install google/googletest).
In addition, dependencies can be automatically downloaded as well by listing them in a requirements.txt file.
There is also recipes for installing non-cmake packages and the repository here has over 300 libraries(and growing). So you can install curl with just cget install pfultz2/cget-recipes curl.
C++ sadly has no package manager for libraries. Some are out there and try to be one which are still small and scattered though (like conan).
In linux you have some "-dev" packages you can install but they are also not "all".
You most likely end up downloading them yourself. Next though is you have the problem of integrating those libraries. You have different build systems per operating system so you have to see how you build c++ files.
Like in windows with Visual studio you have to get a visual studio project or a nmake compatible makefile to build the libraries and then add them to your project. Same with linux makefiles.
There are several build frameworks who are higher level like cmake. The example you have in your post also works with CMake. So integrating that one into a cmake build environment would be easier but this only applies for other libraries also trying to use/integrate cmake build environments to it (e.g. boost / qt is doing this).
Yeah these are some thoughts to this. Sadly there won't be an easy/definitive answer to this because there is no real central c++ packet repository which is also integrated into a build system.
It appears to me that the Crascit/DownloadProject could be of help in your situation. It provides CMake plugins for downloading projects from a git repository by specifying tags, etc. Then you can use add_custom_target to run commands you need to have the project built.
There are a number of popular C++ released via nuget packages.
You can search on the gallery for them, usually using the native or c++ tags. Obviously you need a nuget manager for your OS, and I'm pretty sure that the C++ nuget packages rely on MSBuild for a lot of the grunt work, so you may have trouble getting a non-Visual Studio oriented setup to work nicely.
Also Gradle actually does have some support for native dependencies as well. I had a look at little while ago but the work on it was curtailed because the support for VS 2015 was lacking.
I recommend vcpkg for cross platform development. It has a number of IDE integrations. GitHub project is here.
I do cross platform development using tools like CMake, Visual Studio, WSL. vcpkg was incredibly helpful.
I started new project... in cureent time it's just "source package manager" you can provide some source code on github and then it will be just copy to you project (based on cmake + auto generating cmake files)
So links here:
https://github.com/wsjcpp/wsjcpp
I'm trying to create an Open Source C++ project. I want it to be as easy to build as possible, but at the same time cross platform.
I don't need gui or heavy libraries like boost or Qt, so I've settled on using GitHub, CMake, and LibSourcey.
My problem is, I can't find a way to make my project easy to build in windows, which is my development environment.
How can I "make install" a library in Windows for use in my project? Do I even have to install it in windows?
Is it possible to download, build, and link it automatically?
On windows, besides an installer, I also want to make a portable version, so don't want any hard coded library paths.
I assume, on some platforms, like Linux, libraries are built separably and packaged up by maintainers. So I shouldn't just bundle up my own copies.
So, my question is:
How can I set up a project that is cross platform and easy to build, and what are the best practices?
You can create git submodule in your git repo with path for example
contrib/LibSourcery and url to github repo of LibSourcery, because of LibSourcery uses cmake you just
need add such line into your CMakeLists.txt: add_subdirectory(contrib/LibSourcery)
So person who want to use your code, just do git clone --recursive url
to get all of your code and dependencies, after that it run cmake -G, to create project for IDE of his choice (including MSVC++ of course),
open project in IDE and press build button, that's all.
Use babun. It's a wrapper for cygwin and it works perfectly for everything I need, even compiling with cmake.
Alternatively, you could use premake, which uses lua as a config system and works fine on windows.
There is no elegant cross-platform way, since the idea of "make install" doesn't exist on Windows, therefore the use of cmake install is undefined there. For something which is supposed to help cross-platform, I feel this is a deficiency w cmake.
My solution is to write a custom _INSTALL which takes the same args as cmake install and then on Linux it just calls install, and on Windows it does an add_command which does a post-build copy to the install paths, which accomplishes the same thing. Basically, _INSTALL behaves the way you expect a cross-platform install command to behave. Can share my _INSTALL func if there is interest.
_INSTALL is placed nto a Helper.cmake, and included in all my CMakeList.txt for my projects, so all I need to do is call it and the generated lib/inc files magically appear for both win and linux.
You can use vcpkg, an open source package manager for c and c++. It allows to easily download and compile libraries and then use find_package from within CMake like you would on linux. It's very easy to use. It even provides hints as to how to alter your cmake file to use the libraries.
I started by installing packages with the command line, and then wondered why they wouldn't show up in visual studio. But I realized that it would download 32 bit libraries by default. Use .\vcpkg install <libname>:x64-windows if you need the 64 bit libraries.
After running the integrate command, you will need to delete any cmake caches to have MSVS use the new toolchain.
I understand that CMake enables a project to be easily built in a variety of compiler/IDE environments. I have experienced this for myself and was amazed when CMake produced a working, buildable Xcode project for me from some open source project (cool!)
But what I don't understand is how you properly update the CMake system after you have made significant changes to the project that CMake created for you.
For example I am envisioning a workflow in which the project should be kept portable via CMake. So I create a clone of a github project, use CMake to create my XCode project, and then go to work implementing some new feature or bug fix. Perhaps these changes are non-trivial and affect build.
After these changes are complete I want to push the code base back to github. What happens now? Must all of the CMake files be updated by hand to reflect all of the work that I've done? Or is there some equally magical feature to update the CMake files with the changes that were implemented in XCode (or Visual Studio, or some other supported IDE/compiler combo)?
What is the general "Roundtrip" workflow with CMake and how efficient is it?
The point is that you change your project by changing the CMake configuration files themselves. It could be that you'll find some other tool which manages cmake projects, which will make changes to your cmake files. In the example you mention, you have to check if XCode is modifying your cmake files.
You have to commit all the necessary modifications you do to your cmake files, and your build program (make, ninja, or any other) will run cmake every time the cmake project files are touched.
Advanced note: if you use the command file with globbing instructions to get the list of your sources files, you might be interested to read Getting cmake to run before building after pulling from git
I am new in Ubuntu/Linux and I've been working with java using the NetBeans IDE, so I don't have much experience with building c++ projects. But now I have to provide a proof of concept and I need to connect a C++ client with my ActiveMQ server. I downloaded The ActiveMQ-CPP API from this link, but I can't build/run it.
The download came with the files: Maklefile.am and Makefile.in. I searched it and I found that I need automake/autoconf to build it. I tried running ./configure but it says that it couldn't find such file or directory. I tried
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install automake
sudo apt-get install autoconf
and a lot of other commands that I found on the Internet. None of then worked. I know that this question is really basic and it seems to be already answered somewhere else, but every attempt I've made failed. I think I'm missing something. I even tried the solution provided in the last message in this topic but it didn't work either.
Can anyone help me install autoconf/automake, or tell me how to use Makefile.am / Makefile.in to build the project I downloaded, or even suggest me some other way of building it?
Since you're open to other methods of building your project, I'm going to suggest CMake. It is a far better build system than autotools (at least from where I stand).
#CMakeLists.txt
project(MyProject CXX)
set_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8)
add_executable(foobar foo.cpp bar.cpp)
That example will build an executable called "foobar" by compiling and linking foo.cpp and bar.cpp. Put the above code in a file called CMakeLists.txt, then run the following commands:
cmake <path to project> #run in the folder you want to build in
make #this does the actual work
The really cool thing about CMake is that it generates a build system (Makefiles by default) but you can use it to generate project files for Eclipse, a Visual Studio solution, and a bunch of other things. If you want more information, I'd check out their documentation.
The "configure" script should be in your ActiveMQ-cpp source directory. From the Linux command line, you should be able to:
1) "cd" into your ActiveMQ* directory
2) "ls -l" to see the "configure" script
3) "./configure" to set things up for building the library\
4) "make" to actually build the library
This is mentioned in comments, but this particular point of confusion has been common for well over a decade and I think needs to be clarified as often as possible. You DO NOT need to have autoconf or automake installed to build a project that used those tools. The entire point of the autotools is to generate a build system that will build on a system using only the standard tools (make, a c compiler, sh, and few others.) Unfortunately, many developers release tarballs that do not build cleanly. If you unpack the tarball and it does not contain a configure script, or if the configure script is broken, that is a bug in the package. The solution is absolutely not to install autoconf/automake/libtool and try to produce a working configure script. The solution is to report the build error as a bug to the package maintainer.
The world would be a better place if Linux distributions stopped installing multiple versions of the autotools by default as less than .002% of the population needs those tools, and anyone who actually needs to have the tools should be capable of installing it themselves. Anyone incapable of acquiring and installing the tools has no business using them.