clion wsl "CMake 3.20 or higher is required. You are running version 3.16.3" - cmake

Question

so I just downloaded wslusing the wsl --install command using PowerShell
now I'm trying to connect it to Clion which works
i cant add images so here is a link to it
but when i'm tying to build the project i get this error
"CMake Error at CMakeLists.txt:1 (cmake_minimum_required):
CMake 3.20 or higher is required. You are running version 3.16.3"
my cmake file:
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.20)
project(ex2 C)
set(CMAKE_C_STANDARD 99)
add_executable(ex2
ex2.c ex2.h
main1.c
main2.c)
i tried updating wsl using wsl --update (in powershell)

Answer 1

The CMake installation inside the WSL is used. Unfortunately currently snap doesn't seem to be available in WSL, but installing the latest CMake version isn't too complicated nonetheless:
(optional) uninstall the old cmake installation in WSL; personally I don't see any benefit in multiple CMake installations, but there may be valid reasons for this. Most likely this will just makes the use of cmake more complex, since you need to remember which cmake version is used.
Download the appropriate cmake version from the cmake website ( https://cmake.org/download/ ). The version to choose is the tar.gz file under binary distributions for the x86_64 target. To get version 3.21.4 (currently the latest release), you can download the file from https://github.com/Kitware/CMake/releases/download/v3.21.4/cmake-3.21.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz (Identical to the link on the CMake download page).
Unpack the archive from WSL. Navigate to the directory where you want the cmake installation to recide. This will add the cmake-3.21.4-linux-x86_64 directory containing all the files required to work with cmake to the current working directory. Let's assume you want to add the cmake files to the /opt directory. Furthermore let's assume the windows user name to be fabian, C: to be the primary hard drive and the download to be saved to the Downloads directory in the user directory:
cd /opt
tar -xf /mnt/c/Users/fabian/Downloads/cmake-3.21.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
(optional) make CMake available without specifying the path; this could be done as described here: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/3809/how-can-i-make-a-program-executable-from-everywhere ; don't do this, if an existing cmake installation is already available in the command line assuming you did install cmake to /opt, the cmake binary recides at /opt/cmake-3.21.4-linux-x86_64/bin
You should now be able to use cmake specifying either the full path to the executable (/opt/cmake-3.21.4-linux-x86_64/bin/cmake assuming you used the /opt directory) or directly via a command after opening the WLS commandline again (provided you followed step 4).
Now the only thing left to do should be telling CLion about the location of the cmake executable. Note that I haven't tested this, since I don't use this IDE. It's working fine using Visual Studio Code though...