mattclarke / cpp-template

Template for a C++ project, with Conan for dependency management and some boilerplate for my favourite libraries

Template C++ Project

This aims to be a good starting point for cross-platform, modern C++ projects using CMake.

Features:

• CMake boilerplate to
  • build an executable which depends on some external libraries.
  • set compiler flags to be strict about warnings.
  • make documentation using doxygen.
  • make use of link-time optimisation if available.
  • make use of a faster linker if available.
• Dependency management using Conan.
• A little example code/boilerplate for libraries I use very frequently:
  • fmt
  • spdlog
  • CLI11
  • Catch2

Some things this template lacks which I may add in the future:

• Continuous integration configuration
• Code coverage configuration
• Static code analysis configuration
• Code formatting configuration

Requirements

The only requirements to be manually installed on the system are Python, pip, CMake and a C++ compiler.

Conan requires Python and pip installed on the system, then:

pip install conan

That should be it, Conan will be run automatically by CMake to download the dependencies.

Edit conanfile.txt to add/remove dependencies. If the library you want to use is on https://conan.io/center/ then simply add it under [requires] in conanfile.txt and to the list of libraries to link in CMakeLists.txt. If the library is not in conan center then you'll need to learn about Conan remotes and possibly making your own Conan package recipe, see https://docs.conan.io/en/latest/introduction.html

Build

As usual for a CMake project. For example, make a build directory (preferably somewhere outside the source directory) and do

cmake path/to/source/directory
cmake --build . -- -j8

or, better, with Ninja

cmake -GNinja path/to/source/directory
ninja

or, if you must ;), on Windows

cmake -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" path\to\source\directory
cmake --build . -- -maxcpucount:8

Run

From the build directory

./bin/TemplateProject --help