[Latest version of these instructions can be found at the SFML Wiki]

CMake allows your project to be built in various environments, including command-line make, Code::Blocks project files, Eclipse project files, etc. It's used in SFML 2.0.

In this tutorial we'll write a simple CMake configuration file with centralized version numbering, and see how to integrate SFML in it.

The source files

First, create a cmake_modules directory and copy FindSFML.cmake in it. FindXXXX is automatically searched by CMake's find_package command.

Then create a main.cpp, for instance:

#include "config.h"
#include <iostream>
#include <SFML/Window.hpp>
using namespace std;

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {
  cout << "Version " << myproject_VERSION_MAJOR << "." << myproject_VERSION_MINOR << endl;

  sf::Window screen(sf::VideoMode(800, 600), "myproject");
  bool running = true;
  while (running) {
    screen.Display();
  }
}

We use a config.h file that is built by CMake, let's also create a config.h.in file:

#define myproject_VERSION_MAJOR @myproject_VERSION_MAJOR@
#define myproject_VERSION_MINOR @myproject_VERSION_MINOR@

And place your project license (such as the GNU GPL) in a file named COPYING.

CMake configuration

Let's describe our project configuration in the CMakeLists.txt file: [[!format Error: unsupported page format make]]

The interesting part is: [[!format Error: unsupported page format make]]

First we specify where we stored the FindSFML.cmake module.
Then we request CMake to look for it in the system, and search for the specified modules (here I specified them all).
Last, we tell CMake to link our executable with the SFML libraries that it just found.

Compilation

To build with Make and the GCC compiler on the command-line:

cd build/  # a separate directory so we can easily remove all the CMake work files
cmake ..  # generate Makefile's
make

To create Code::Blocks project files:

cmake .. -G "CodeBlocks - Unix Makefiles"

and open project.cbp with Code::Blocks.

Installation

CMake supports the classic:

make install

It also supports DESTDIR, useful in packaging:

make install DESTDIR=`pwd`/myworkdir

You can also define CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX when invoking cmake to change the default install path (/usr/local under Unix). DESTDIR would still override this setting.

Packaging

You then can use cpack to make a project release:

# Binary package:
cpack -C CPackConfig.cmake
# Source package:
cpack -C CPackSourceConfig.cmake

You will get a nice myproject-1.0.tar.gz, among others.

Further information

CMake has built-in help, for instance:

$ cmake --help-variable CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR
cmake version 2.8.5
  CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR
       The path to the top level of the source tree.

       This is the full path to the top level of the current CMake source
       tree.  For an in-source build, this would be the same as
       CMAKE_BINARY_DIR.