CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++cmakeshared-libraries
Ikram ullah
Ikram ullah

Reputation: 3

adding non standard library to cmake using FindLibrary.cmake

I want to use a tree parsing library (NHParser) in my code. I have make-installed the library in /home/ikram/parser (with include files in /home/ikram/parser/include/NHparser/ and lib files in /home/ikram/parser/lib/ directory). I am wondering if, in the first place, I can just add the library and include file in my main CMakeLists.txt file without resorting to FindNHPARSER.cmake script? If yes, how I may achieve that?

I tried the above but couldn't succeed so I wrote FindNHPARSER.cmake like the following.

find_path(NHPARSER_INCLUDE_DIR include/NHparser/NHparser.h
                    HINTS PATH_SUFFIXES NHparser)
find_library(NHPARSER_LIBRARY NAMES NHparser)

set(NHparser_LIBRARIES ${NHparser_LIBRARY})
set(NHparser_INCLUDE_DIRS ${NHparser_INCLUDE_DIR})
include(FindPackageHandleStandardArgs)
mark_as_advanced(NHparser_INCLUDE_DIR NHparser_LIBRARY )

Is it correctly written? How I can include this in my main CMakeLists.txt script and do I need to set CMAKE_MODULE_PATH while running cmake?

Thanks for your time.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 892

Answers (1)

Fraser
Fraser

Reputation: 78398

For such a small (fairly standard) find process, I'd just add the code directly to the main CMakeLists.txt.

You can move it to a separate .cmake file if you prefer - then you'd just include that file at the appropriate point in your main CMakeLists.txt.

As for the code, I'd keep it pretty simple; essentially just a find_path and find_library call along with checks that the relevant things were actually found:

find_path(NHPARSER_INCLUDE_DIR NAMES NHparser.h PATH_SUFFIXES NHparser)
if(NOT NHPARSER_INCLUDE_DIR)
  message(FATAL_ERROR "Didn't find NHparser.h")
endif()

find_library(NHPARSER_LIBRARY NAMES NHparser)
if(NOT NHPARSER_LIBRARY)
  message(FATAL_ERROR "Didn't find NHparser library")
endif()

The you can use the variables like:

include_directories(${NHPARSER_INCLUDE_DIR})
...
target_link_libraries(MyExe ${NHPARSER_LIBRARY})

The variables are unlikely to be found unaided though, since the install prefix for this library on your machine seems to be "/home/ikram/parser". Since this location is probably specific to your own machine, I wouldn't hard-code that into your CMakeLists.txt.

Instead, to have CMake add that path to the list of default search paths, just set CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH when you invoke CMake:

cmake . -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/home/ikram/parser

Upvotes: 1

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