Packaging with CPack

Building projects from a source has its benefits, but it can take a long time and introduce a lot of complexity. This isn't the best experience for end users who just want to use the package, especially if they aren't developers themselves. A much more convenient form of software distribution is to use binary packages that contain compiled artifacts and other static files that are needed by the runtime. CMake supports generating multiple kinds of such packages through a command-line tool called cpack.

The following table lists the available package generators:

Most of these generators have extensive configurations. It is beyond the scope of this book to delve into all their details, so be sure to check out the full documentation, which can be found in the Further reading section. Instead, we'll focus on the general use case.

Note

Package generators shouldn't be confused with buildsystem generators (Unix Makefiles...