CMake Cookbook

Porting install targets

We can now configure, compile, link, and test the code, but we are missing the install target, which we will add in this section.

This is the Autotools approach to building and installing code:

$ ./configure --prefix=/some/install/path$ make$ make install

And this is the CMake way:

$ mkdir -p build$ cd build$ cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/some/install/path ..$ cmake --build .$ cmake --build . --target install

To add an install target, we add the following snippet in src/CMakeLists.txt:

install(  TARGETS    vim  RUNTIME DESTINATION    ${CMAKE_INSTALL_BINDIR}  )

In this example, we only install the executable. The Vim project installs a large number of files along with the binary (symbolic links and documentation files). To ...