CMake Cookbook Notes 3: Detecting External Libraries and Programs

Chapter 3 Detecting External Libraries and Programs

3.1 Detecting the Python interpreter

• find_package can be used to find a package located somewhere in your system. The CMake module which takes effect is Find<name>.cmake when find_package(<name>) is called.

  In addition to find the specified package, find_package will also set up some useful variables to indicate the result of finding:

  cmake

  find_package(PythonInterp REQUIRED)
  execute_process(COMMAND ${PYTHON_EXECUTABLE} "-c" "print('Hello, world!')")

• We can use cmake_print_variables from CMakePrintHelpers module for better print format.

3.2 Detecting the Python library

• Use find_package to find both Python interpreter and library. To ensure their versions corresponds, we can specify the version in find_package:

  cmake

  find_package(PythonInterp REQUIRED)
  find_package(PythonLibs ${PYTHON_VERSION_MAJOR}.${PYTHON_VERSION_MINOR} EXACT REQUIRED)
  target_include_directories(hello-embedded-python
    PRIVATE
      ${PYTHON_INCLUDE_DIRS}
    )
  target_link_libraries(hello-embedded-python
    PRIVATE
      ${PYTHON_LIBRARIES}
    )

3.3 Detecting Python modules and packages

• We can use execute_process to execute commands in child processes, and get the return value, output and error info if failure.

Link

• https://subscription.packtpub.com/book/application_development/9781788470711/3