Modern CMake example project

An example CMake project highlighting various modern practices. Feel free to use this project as a template for bootstrapping or modernizing your own CMake project.

Installation

This project contains a simple hello-world example, so you can clone, build and run to see the template in action. E.g. after cloning this repository you can run:

$ cmake -B ./build
$ cmake --build ./build
$ ./build/hello
Hello, world!

What's in this template

Modern CMake design

This modern design ensures:

• The project can be configured and built easily by a user using cmake-presets.
• It can import other CMake projects seamlessly regardless if it's installed on the system, downloaded from the internet or even if the project is not built in CMake.
• It can be imported and used by other CMake projects, including being partially imported, e.g. to run CTest on the copy of the project already installed.
• The project is easily navigable in a logical structure, such that a user without any CMake experience can guess on the capabilities of the project.
• The CMake components can be documented using a sphinx documentation engine.

Modern CI tools

The CI tools available are constantly evolving, but broadly they cover:

• GitHub Actions workflows for:
  • Enforcing coding standards
  • CI testing the project against multiple distros and compilers
  • CD to easily publish new releases
  • Hardening workflow permissions
  • Maintain a reusable format that can be imported by other projects
• pre-commit for managing most coding standards
• sphinx documentation
• Static code analysis

Packaging and downstream tools

In this template we focus on packaging to Fedora due to their vast CI tools:

• packit: Used for testing the packaging on copr, run additional tests on testing-farm, and make pull-requests downstream (e.g. on Fedora)
• tmt and testing-farm: Used to test your project as if it has been installed and run locally

License

This template project is licensed under MIT license. Please update the LICENSE file after using this template. You may re-license your project as you wish after using this template.