My goal was to see details about an invocation of g++ called directly by cmake from the command line. I do not care about the output of make for the purposes of this question.
According to the official FAQ and the accepted answer on a related question, I should make sure CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON is set in my generated CMakeCache.txt, by e.g. passing the commandline flag -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON. When I did that it re-queried a bunch of properties, but gave no extra information about the invocation.
However, calling cmake with the flag --verbose=1 showed me exactly what I needed.
What are these two options doing differently? Is --verbose=1 deprecated or otherwise discouraged?
No, that's not what the accepted answer and the CMake FAQ you link say, otherwise I would be surprised.
Precisely, they don't say that you should modify CMakeCache.txt. Don't modify that file, it's not a good practice, since one can easily make mistakes.
If you instead have followed exactly what both sources say, i.e.
cmake -DCMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE:BOOL=ON .
make
or
cmake .
make VERBOSE=1
you would have seen a verbose output from the compilation and linking phases.
Alternatively, you should achieve the same effect if you put in your CMakeLists.txt file the following line:
set( CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE on )
The fact that you do not see output in one of the cases might due to previously cached configurations.
I suggest you do if possible out-of-source builds so that in this case you can get rid of every CMake generated files and directories by just removing the build directory.
Then you could just recreate new configurations without interference from previously generated configurations and build files.
Of course, I might be wrong and you hit a bug, but it seems unlikely.
EDIT: That's because in the configuration phase you're not compiling, i.e. you are not using a Makefile, which is what the command line option set. It's not a verbose option for the cmake command itself at any stage (configuration, compiling, installing) of the project build. It will not show extra configuration info when you do cmake . but it should show you extra information when you run the make.
So CMAKE_VERBOSE_MAKEFILE is the wrong option to set if you want to get verbose output from CMake itself.
Related
I'm trying to use add_custom_command to generate a file during the build. The command never seemed to be run, so I made this test file.
cmake_minimum_required( VERSION 2.6 )
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT hello.txt
COMMAND touch hello.txt
DEPENDS hello.txt
)
I tried running:
cmake .
make
And hello.txt was not generated. What have I done wrong?
The add_custom_target(run ALL ... solution will work for simple cases when you only have one target you're building, but breaks down when you have multiple top level targets, e.g. app and tests.
I ran into this same problem when I was trying to package up some test data files into an object file so my unit tests wouldn't depend on anything external. I solved it using add_custom_command and some additional dependency magic with set_property.
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT testData.cpp
COMMAND reswrap
ARGS testData.src > testData.cpp
DEPENDS testData.src
)
set_property(SOURCE unit-tests.cpp APPEND PROPERTY OBJECT_DEPENDS testData.cpp)
add_executable(app main.cpp)
add_executable(tests unit-tests.cpp)
So now testData.cpp will generated before unit-tests.cpp is compiled, and any time testData.src changes. If the command you're calling is really slow you get the added bonus that when you build just the app target you won't have to wait around for that command (which only the tests executable needs) to finish.
It's not shown above, but careful application of ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}, ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR} and include_directories() will keep your source tree clean of generated files.
Add the following:
add_custom_target(run ALL
DEPENDS hello.txt)
If you're familiar with makefiles, this means:
all: run
run: hello.txt
The problem with two existing answers is that they either make the dependency global (add_custom_target(name ALL ...)), or they assign it to a specific, single file (set_property(...)) which gets obnoxious if you have many files that need it as a dependency. Instead what we want is a target that we can make a dependency of another target.
The way to do this is to use add_custom_command to define the rule, and then add_custom_target to define a new target based on that rule. Then you can add that target as a dependency of another target via add_dependencies.
# this defines the build rule for some_file
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT some_file
COMMAND ...
)
# create a target that includes some_file, this gives us a name that we can use later
add_custom_target(
some_target
DEPENDS some_file
)
# then let's suppose we're creating a library
add_library(some_library some_other_file.c)
# we can add the target as a dependency, and it will affect only this library
add_dependencies(some_library some_target)
The advantages of this approach:
some_target is not a dependency for ALL, which means you only build it when it's required by a specific target. (Whereas add_custom_target(name ALL ...) would build it unconditionally for all targets.)
Because some_target is a dependency for the library as a whole, it will get built before all of the files in that library. That means that if there are many files in the library, we don't have to do set_property on every single one of them.
If we add DEPENDS to add_custom_command then it will only get rebuilt when its inputs change. (Compare this to the approach that uses add_custom_target(name ALL ...) where the command gets run on every build regardless of whether it needs to or not.)
For more information on why things work this way, see this blog post: https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/cmake-dependencies-between-targets-and-files-and-custom-commands/
This question is pretty old, but even if I follow the suggested recommendations, it does not work for me (at least not every time).
I am using Android Studio and I need to call cMake to build C++ library. It works fine until I add the code to run my custom script (in fact, at the moment I try to run 'touch', as in the example above).
First of,
add_custom_command
does not work at all.
I tried
execute_process (
COMMAND touch hello.txt
)
it works, but not every time!
I tried to clean the project, remove the created file(s) manually, same thing.
Tried cMake versions:
3.10.2
3.18.1
3.22.1
when they work, they produce different results, depending on cMake version, one file or several. This is not that important as long as they work, but that's the issue.
Can somebody shed light on this mystery?
I'm trying to use add_custom_command to generate a file during the build. The command never seemed to be run, so I made this test file.
cmake_minimum_required( VERSION 2.6 )
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT hello.txt
COMMAND touch hello.txt
DEPENDS hello.txt
)
I tried running:
cmake .
make
And hello.txt was not generated. What have I done wrong?
The add_custom_target(run ALL ... solution will work for simple cases when you only have one target you're building, but breaks down when you have multiple top level targets, e.g. app and tests.
I ran into this same problem when I was trying to package up some test data files into an object file so my unit tests wouldn't depend on anything external. I solved it using add_custom_command and some additional dependency magic with set_property.
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT testData.cpp
COMMAND reswrap
ARGS testData.src > testData.cpp
DEPENDS testData.src
)
set_property(SOURCE unit-tests.cpp APPEND PROPERTY OBJECT_DEPENDS testData.cpp)
add_executable(app main.cpp)
add_executable(tests unit-tests.cpp)
So now testData.cpp will generated before unit-tests.cpp is compiled, and any time testData.src changes. If the command you're calling is really slow you get the added bonus that when you build just the app target you won't have to wait around for that command (which only the tests executable needs) to finish.
It's not shown above, but careful application of ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}, ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR} and include_directories() will keep your source tree clean of generated files.
Add the following:
add_custom_target(run ALL
DEPENDS hello.txt)
If you're familiar with makefiles, this means:
all: run
run: hello.txt
The problem with two existing answers is that they either make the dependency global (add_custom_target(name ALL ...)), or they assign it to a specific, single file (set_property(...)) which gets obnoxious if you have many files that need it as a dependency. Instead what we want is a target that we can make a dependency of another target.
The way to do this is to use add_custom_command to define the rule, and then add_custom_target to define a new target based on that rule. Then you can add that target as a dependency of another target via add_dependencies.
# this defines the build rule for some_file
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT some_file
COMMAND ...
)
# create a target that includes some_file, this gives us a name that we can use later
add_custom_target(
some_target
DEPENDS some_file
)
# then let's suppose we're creating a library
add_library(some_library some_other_file.c)
# we can add the target as a dependency, and it will affect only this library
add_dependencies(some_library some_target)
The advantages of this approach:
some_target is not a dependency for ALL, which means you only build it when it's required by a specific target. (Whereas add_custom_target(name ALL ...) would build it unconditionally for all targets.)
Because some_target is a dependency for the library as a whole, it will get built before all of the files in that library. That means that if there are many files in the library, we don't have to do set_property on every single one of them.
If we add DEPENDS to add_custom_command then it will only get rebuilt when its inputs change. (Compare this to the approach that uses add_custom_target(name ALL ...) where the command gets run on every build regardless of whether it needs to or not.)
For more information on why things work this way, see this blog post: https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/cmake-dependencies-between-targets-and-files-and-custom-commands/
This question is pretty old, but even if I follow the suggested recommendations, it does not work for me (at least not every time).
I am using Android Studio and I need to call cMake to build C++ library. It works fine until I add the code to run my custom script (in fact, at the moment I try to run 'touch', as in the example above).
First of,
add_custom_command
does not work at all.
I tried
execute_process (
COMMAND touch hello.txt
)
it works, but not every time!
I tried to clean the project, remove the created file(s) manually, same thing.
Tried cMake versions:
3.10.2
3.18.1
3.22.1
when they work, they produce different results, depending on cMake version, one file or several. This is not that important as long as they work, but that's the issue.
Can somebody shed light on this mystery?
I'm trying to use add_custom_command to generate a file during the build. The command never seemed to be run, so I made this test file.
cmake_minimum_required( VERSION 2.6 )
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT hello.txt
COMMAND touch hello.txt
DEPENDS hello.txt
)
I tried running:
cmake .
make
And hello.txt was not generated. What have I done wrong?
The add_custom_target(run ALL ... solution will work for simple cases when you only have one target you're building, but breaks down when you have multiple top level targets, e.g. app and tests.
I ran into this same problem when I was trying to package up some test data files into an object file so my unit tests wouldn't depend on anything external. I solved it using add_custom_command and some additional dependency magic with set_property.
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT testData.cpp
COMMAND reswrap
ARGS testData.src > testData.cpp
DEPENDS testData.src
)
set_property(SOURCE unit-tests.cpp APPEND PROPERTY OBJECT_DEPENDS testData.cpp)
add_executable(app main.cpp)
add_executable(tests unit-tests.cpp)
So now testData.cpp will generated before unit-tests.cpp is compiled, and any time testData.src changes. If the command you're calling is really slow you get the added bonus that when you build just the app target you won't have to wait around for that command (which only the tests executable needs) to finish.
It's not shown above, but careful application of ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}, ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR} and include_directories() will keep your source tree clean of generated files.
Add the following:
add_custom_target(run ALL
DEPENDS hello.txt)
If you're familiar with makefiles, this means:
all: run
run: hello.txt
The problem with two existing answers is that they either make the dependency global (add_custom_target(name ALL ...)), or they assign it to a specific, single file (set_property(...)) which gets obnoxious if you have many files that need it as a dependency. Instead what we want is a target that we can make a dependency of another target.
The way to do this is to use add_custom_command to define the rule, and then add_custom_target to define a new target based on that rule. Then you can add that target as a dependency of another target via add_dependencies.
# this defines the build rule for some_file
add_custom_command(
OUTPUT some_file
COMMAND ...
)
# create a target that includes some_file, this gives us a name that we can use later
add_custom_target(
some_target
DEPENDS some_file
)
# then let's suppose we're creating a library
add_library(some_library some_other_file.c)
# we can add the target as a dependency, and it will affect only this library
add_dependencies(some_library some_target)
The advantages of this approach:
some_target is not a dependency for ALL, which means you only build it when it's required by a specific target. (Whereas add_custom_target(name ALL ...) would build it unconditionally for all targets.)
Because some_target is a dependency for the library as a whole, it will get built before all of the files in that library. That means that if there are many files in the library, we don't have to do set_property on every single one of them.
If we add DEPENDS to add_custom_command then it will only get rebuilt when its inputs change. (Compare this to the approach that uses add_custom_target(name ALL ...) where the command gets run on every build regardless of whether it needs to or not.)
For more information on why things work this way, see this blog post: https://samthursfield.wordpress.com/2015/11/21/cmake-dependencies-between-targets-and-files-and-custom-commands/
This question is pretty old, but even if I follow the suggested recommendations, it does not work for me (at least not every time).
I am using Android Studio and I need to call cMake to build C++ library. It works fine until I add the code to run my custom script (in fact, at the moment I try to run 'touch', as in the example above).
First of,
add_custom_command
does not work at all.
I tried
execute_process (
COMMAND touch hello.txt
)
it works, but not every time!
I tried to clean the project, remove the created file(s) manually, same thing.
Tried cMake versions:
3.10.2
3.18.1
3.22.1
when they work, they produce different results, depending on cMake version, one file or several. This is not that important as long as they work, but that's the issue.
Can somebody shed light on this mystery?
So, I'm trying to build an application that requires gtkglextmm on CentOS. So far, I grabbed the source (from here) for gtkglext and gtkglextmm, and (finally) figured out how to compile them and install them using ./configure then make then sudo make install. That was pretty cool to get that to work.
Now, I'm trying to build Degate with cmake and it's complaining that it can't find gtkglextmm. What do I need to do to get the gtkglextmm library I built, available for cmake?
Rephrase: Built and installed library a with make,make install. Now want to build application b that depends on a with cmake. How?
Thanks!
This is a newcomer's notes made for my team as we adopt cmake. It summarizes briefly what I thought would be somewhere in a novice's example. Although with references and suitable for novices, I am very new to the material and this example may suffer accordingly.
General info for this question is at: https://cmake.org/Wiki/CMake:How_To_Find_Libraries - in particular, find_package can be used on any of the named packages listed by the help command:
cmake --help-module-list
Note: the 'Find' is omitted (e.g., FindLibXml2 -> find_package(LibXml2) )
However, for this type of library, it is more likely that it will not be in that list, in which case you want to use find_library and find_path instead. A simple example is:
find_library(SQLITE3_LIB sqlite3) # simple because I did not need to give paths
find_path(SQLITE3_PATH sqlite3.h)
target_link_libraries( your_target_name ${SQLITE3_LIB} )
include_directories( ${SQLITE3_PATH} )
You do not need to test if these have the '-NOTFOUND' return value because cmake will exit with an error if they do:
...
CMake Error: The following variables are used in this project, but they are set to NOTFOUND.
Please set them or make sure they are set and tested correctly in the CMake files:
SQLITE3_LIB
linked by target "test" in directory /home/matlab/QFDC_ROOT/api
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
Note that the all-capitalized 'SQLITE3_LIB' and 'SQLITE3_PATH' are the variable names that I chose. You choose the variable names. If you have other libraries and include directories, you can list them before and after this one and separated by spaces (I ordered them by their link order consistently for both, although I think include paths are insensitive).
Your case may not be so simple, in which case you want to use the CMake features described at find_library for providing CMake more information about where it should find that library. There are other Q&A on specifically that topic - my favorite is to produce your own FindXXX.cmake (although it is a very terse answer pointing you to an example).
In many cases, it is helpful to run make VERBOSE=1 to help you troubleshoot the process, such as cd build && cmake .. && make VERBOSE=1.
For even better diagnostics, I used DLRdave's answer to print out the INCLUDE_DIRS and I used a simple message to return the results of my variables:
message( STATUS "SQLITE3_LIB: ${SQLITE3_LIB} SQLITE3_PATH: ${SQLITE3_PATH}")
get_property(dirs DIRECTORY ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR} PROPERTY INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES)
foreach(dir ${dirs})
message(STATUS "dir='${dir}'")
endforeach()
EDIT NOTE: this answer was effectively re-written 2016-04-08 after discovering that the previous day's implementation erred and confused find_library() and find_path().
After running the cmake command once to generate a build system, when, if ever, should I rerun the cmake command?
The generated build systems can detect changes in the associated CMakeLists.txt files and behave accordingly. You can see the logic for doing so in generated Makefiles. The exact rules for when this will happen successfully are mysterious to me.
When should I rerun cmake? Does the answer depend on the generator used?
This blog post (under heading: "Invoking CMake multiple times") points out the confusion over this issue and states that the answer is actually 'never', regardless of generator, but I find that surprising. Is it true?
The answer is simple:
The cmake binary of course needs to re-run each time you make changes to any build setting, but you wont need to do it by design; hence "never" is correct regarding commands you have to issue.
The build targets created by cmake automatically include checks for each file subsequently [=starting from the main CMakeLists.txt file] involved or included generating the current set of Makefiles/VS projects/whatever. When invoking make (assuming unix here) this automatically triggers a previous execution of cmake if necessary; so your generated projects include logic to invoke cmake itself! As all command-line parameters initially passed (e.g. cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RELEASE .. will be stored in the CMakeCache.txt, you dont need to re-specify any of those on subsequent invocations, which is why the projects also can just run cmake and know it still does what you intended.
Some more detail:
CMake generates book-keeping files containing all files that were involved in Makefile/Project generation, see e.g. these sample contents of my <binary-dir>/CMakeFiles/Makefile.cmake file using MSYS makefiles:
# The top level Makefile was generated from the following files:
set(CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS
"CMakeCache.txt"
"C:/Program Files (x86)/CMake/share/cmake-3.1/Modules/CMakeCCompiler.cmake.in"
"C:/Program Files (x86)/CMake/share/cmake-3.1/Modules/RepositoryInfo.txt.in"
"<my external project bin dir>/release/ep_tmp/IRON-cfgcmd.txt.in"
"../CMakeFindModuleWrappers/FindBLAS.cmake"
"../CMakeFindModuleWrappers/FindLAPACK.cmake"
"../CMakeLists.txt"
"../CMakeScripts/CreateLocalConfig.cmake"
"../Config/Variables.cmake"
"../Dependencies.cmake"
"CMakeFiles/3.1.0/CMakeCCompiler.cmake"
"CMakeFiles/3.1.0/CMakeRCCompiler.cmake")
Any modification to any of these files will trigger another cmake run whenever you choose to start a build of a target. I honestly dont know how fine-grained those dependencies tracking goes in CMake, i.e. if a target will just be build if any changes somewhere else wont affect the target's compilation. I wouldn't expect it as this can get messy quite quickly, and repeated CMake runs (correctly using the Cache capabilities) are very fast anyways.
The only case where you need to re-run cmake is when you change the compiler after you started a project(MyProject); but even this case is handled by newer CMake versions automatically now (with some yelling :-)).
additional comment responding to comments:
There are cases where you will need to manually re-run cmake, and that is whenever you write your configure scripts so badly that cmake cannot possibly detect files/dependencies you're creating. A typical scenario would be that your first cmake run creates files using e.g. execute_process and you would then include them using file(GLOB ..). This is BAD style and the CMake Docs for file explicitly say
Note: We do not recommend using GLOB to collect a list of source files from your source tree. If no CMakeLists.txt file changes when a source is added or removed then the generated build system cannot know when to ask CMake to regenerate.
Btw this comment also sheds light on the above explained self-invocation by the generated build system :-)
The "proper" way to treat this kind of situations where you create source files during configure time is to use add_custom_command(OUTPUT ...), so that CMake is "aware" of a file being generated and tracks changes correctly. If for some reason you can't/won't use add_custom_command, you can still let CMake know of your file generation using the source file property GENERATED. Any source file with this flag set can be hard-coded into target source files and CMake wont complain about missing files at configure time (and expects this file to be generated some time during the (first!) cmake run.
Looking into this topic for reading the version information from a debian/changelog file (generation phase), I ran in the topic that cmake execution should be triggered as debian/changelog is modified. So I had the need to add debian/changelog to CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS.
In my case, debian/changelog is read through execute_process. Execute_process unfortunately gives no possibility to add files processed to CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS. But I found that running configure_file will do it. Actually I am really missing something like DEPENDENCIES in execute_process.
However, as I had the need to configure the debian/changelog file for my needs, the solution came implicitly to me.
I actually also found a hint about this in the official documentation of configure_file:
"If the input file is modified the build system will re-run CMake to re-configure the file and generate the build system again."
So using configure_file should be a safe to trigger the re-run of cmake.
From a user perspective, I would expect other commands to extend CMAKE_MAKEFILE_DEPENDS, too. E.g. execute_process (on demand) but also file(READ) (implicitly like configure_file). Perhaps there are others. Each read file is likely to influence the generation phase. As an alternative it would be nice to have a command to just extend the dependency list (hint for the cmake developers, perhaps one comes along).