Building your first project

Now, it’s time to get your hands dirty and see if your installation worked. We have provided an example of a simple hello world project that you can download and build right away. Open a console, type in the following, and you’ll be ready to go:

git clone   https://github.com/PacktPublishing/CMake-Best-Practices---2nd-Edition.git
cd CMake-Best-Practices---2nd-Edition/chapter01/simple_executable
cmake -S . -B build
cmake -–build ./build

This will result in an executable called ch_simple_executable that prints out Welcome to CMake Best Practices on the console.

Let’s have a detailed look at what happened here:

First, the example repository is checked out using Git. The file structure of the example CMake project located in the chapter01/simple_executable subfolder will look like this before the build:

.
├── CMakeLists.txt
└── src
    └...