CMake Cookbook

There is more

Note that the substitution of placeholders with values expects the variable names in CMake to be exactly the same as those used in the to-be configured file, and placed in between @-markers. Any CMake variable defined at the point where configure_file is invoked can be used. This includes all built-in CMake variables, such as CMAKE_VERSION or CMAKE_GENERATOR, in our example. Moreover, whenever the template file is modified, rebuilding the code will trigger a regeneration of the build system. In this way, the configured file will always be up to date.

A complete list of internal CMake variables can be obtained from the CMake manual by using cmake --help-variable-list.

The command file(GENERATE ...) provides an interesting alternative ...