Modern CMake

CMake is a build system generator: it lets you describe how a C++ project should be built in a portable way, and then generates the build files for a variety of tools such as Unix Makefiles, Ninja, or Visual Studio projects. This makes it possible for your code to be configured, compiled and run consistently across different operating systems, compilers and machines.

This course introduces the basics of CMake. Starting from a simple "hello, world" executable, you will learn how to write CMakeLists.txt files, configure and build a project, structure larger projects across subdirectories, define library and executable targets, find and link external dependencies, and use features of the CMake language to make your builds portable and reproducible. It then goes further, into build presets, fetching dependencies, testing with CTest, and installing a library so that other projects can find and use it.

The course is accompanied by a series of checkpoints, each a small C++ project to work through, in the ModernCMakeCourse repository.