fkutzner / NiceMake

A collection of commonly useful CMake functions for C and C++ projects

NiceMake 0.3.0 (development version)

A collection of commonly useful CMake functions for C and C++ projects

Linux/macOS tests:
Windows/Cygwin tests:

Table of contents:

1. Introduction
2. Scope
3. Documentation
4. Requirements
5. Getting started
6. Versions
7. Branches and tags

Introduction

NiceMake is a collection of CMake scripts for quickly setting up C and C++ projects, providing generic functionality such as (so far):

• platform and compiler-family detection
• Clang/GCC sanitizer setup
• third-party library handling
• a thin wrapper for add_library which adds compiler flags, include directories and third-party library dependencies
• configure-time download of Google Test

NiceMake uses the convention-over-configuration approach, using default project layout conventions close to those used by the LLVM project. See the examples or the manual for further details.

NiceMake is free software distributed under the MIT license (X11 variant).

Scope

NiceMake aims to provide the functionality useful for most CMake-based C and C++ projects with a relatively simple project structure. It is non-intrusive in the sense that it can be easily used with plain CMake code (for example, targets defined using the add_library wrapper are regular CMake targets with no new magic attached). NiceMake functions should be short, light on dependencies and easy to understand. Thus, NiceMake is not a framework that is difficult to escape.

Documentation

See the NiceMake manual. There is also a Changelog.

Requirements

NiceMake 0.3.0 requires CMake version 3.6.

Getting started

1. Copy NiceMake somewhere into your project, e.g. to the directory cmake/nicemake (such that cmake/nicemake/NiceMake.cmake exists). If you use git, you could simply dd the NiceMake repository as a submodule.
2. In your toplevel CMakeLists.txt, include NiceMake by inserting the line include(cmake/nicemake/NiceMake.cmake)
3. See the examples or the manual.

Versions

This project uses semantic versioning. In short: as soon as NiceMake has reached version 1.0.0,

• no breaking changes are introduced with minor-version or patchlevel updates, e.g. you can update the NiceMake from 1.2.2 to 1.3.1 without worrying about compatibility.
• breaking changes (e.g. increasing the required CMake version) may be introduced with major-version updates, e.g. with version 2.0.0.

Branches and tags

Branch/tag	Type	Purpose
current	branch	Development branch
master	branch	Stable branch
rel-A.B.x-patches	branch	Patch branch for release A.B.*
rel-A.B.C	tag	Tag pointing to release A.B.C