CODEWITHSUNDEEP
modulecmake
Nathan Osman
Nathan Osman

Reputation: 73255

Proper approach to sharing CMake module across projects?

I have written a CMake module that contains a couple of useful macros that I would like to use across a number of other CMake projects. However, I'm not sure where to put the module.

I would like to be able to do this inside each project that uses the macro:

include(MyModule)

However, I'm not sure if there is an easy and cross-platform way of achieving this. In fact, I can't even get it to work on Unix. I put the module (MyModule.cmake) in the following locations:

...and the project with the include() was unable to load the module.

What is the correct location for this module? Is there a better approach?

I should also point out that the macros are not related to "finding" a third-party library and therefore have nothing to do with find_package().

Upvotes: 4

Views: 185

Answers (1)

starball
starball

Reputation: 51055

Put the module in a directory of your choice, and then add that directory to CMAKE_MODULE_PATH using list(APPEND).

You can even host that module somewhere and then download it via file(DOWNLOAD). If you download it to the same directory as the current CMake script being processed, you just include(MyModule.cmake) and don't need to modify CMAKE_MODULE_PATH.

You could download the file to a common location on disk and then add a check using if(EXISTS "${module_location_on_disk}") to skip the download if it's already downloaded. Of course, more logic will be required if your module changes, or you want to have a common location and multiple versions of the module, but that's out of those scope of your question.

Upvotes: 0

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