troglobit / temp

Template to use for C projects

Template Project

This project can be used as a template for your next little C project. It comes with lots of "frog DNA" from libite (-lite), that holds utility functions missing from the standard C library, and an epoll() based event loop from libuEv -- all you need for that made-easy programming experience!

The project is built using GNU autotools, in a special stripped-down setup that even the most die-hard CMake or Meson champion will find user friendly.

Take Care!
/Joachim <3

Example

The included source is an example of how to periodically poll the Linux hwmon temperature sensors and save data to a JSON file for consumption by some other tool.

Since the program has external dependencies, you need to install them first. On a Debian/Ubuntu based system:

sudo apt install libuev-dev libite-dev pkg-config

The latter is used by the build system to find the libraries.

Building

This repo is meant to be used as an example and template, so it does not contain any tarball releases. These artifacts can be created using the command make dist, when you have configured the project.

To get the most out of this example you need to know a few things about the Autotools build system and the key components:

• configure.ac and the per-directory Makefile.am are source files
• configure and Makefile.in are generated from autogen.sh
• Makefile are generated by the configure script

I subscribe to the tenet that generated files should not be saved in version control systems. That is why none of my projects have these files in GIT. The generated tarballs (above), however, do and that is why they are more suitable for end-user consumption.

To build the example you must, of course, first clone the repository and then run the autogen.sh script. This requires you to have automake and autoconf installed on your system (we assume you already have the C compiler and make installed):

sudo apt install autoconf automake

Finally, clone and build:

git clone https://github.com/troglobit/template.git
cd template/
./autogen.sh
./configure && make

If you are using a different Linux or UNIX distribution, check the output from ./configure --help, followed by make all install. For instance, building on Alpine Linux:

PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR=/usr/local/lib/pkgconfig ./configure \
    --prefix=/usr --localstatedir=/var --sysconfdir=/etc

Provided the library dependencies (above) were built and installed in the /usr/local/ directory. This PKG_CONFIG_LIBDIR trick may be needed on other GNU/Linux, or UNIX, distributions as well.