Writing modular software, you might sooner or later come into the situation, that you have some functionality, that you want to share between different projects. Let’s say, to have built a couple of convenience classes and function that you want to reuse.
There are different ways to skin the cat, one of them might be using a dedicated C++ dependency manager like Biicode. Or a general package manager for your platform of choice, like apt-get on Debian and Ubuntu, or Homebrew on OSX.
Usually you will start with putting your module or library into a git repositry, if you haven’t done that already. For Code that I want publish publicly, I usually choose my github account.
Now for creating a homebrew package, or a debian package, you either need to create some project description, a bit of boilerplate, and need some platform like launchpad to publish packages. Or in the case of biicode, you need an additional account at another platform, and you have to install another tool.
However, there is another approach, that uses software that you probably already have, and that is CMake and Git.
CMake has a functionality called ExternalProject_add, which can use, to automatically check out a git repository, and build that as part of the normal build process.
Of course, the same functionality would be possible with git submodules, but honestly, I always found this part of git rather cumbersome, and unnecessarily complex, for what I want to do.
So, I’ve created two small examples, that show how to create a small library, and link to it through CMake ExternalProject_add:
The first one is the library: cmake_simple_lib
And the second one is the project that uses the library: cmake_simple_demo
I hope you find that useful.
Cheers
-Richard