Use cmake on a target without sources

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I can't seem to find this answer anywhere.

I have several libraries that are header-only due to being templatized.

What I'd like is to provide a CMakeLists.txt under each of them that exports their include folder as an include location, if that makes sense.

See what I've tried.

One option would be to include an empty cmake_dummy.cpp file with htcw_bits and other similar header only libraries just to give CMake something to bind to but this seems sloppy as heck.

Surely, they've thought of this use case and I'm just not looking in the right place.

What I have tried:

Note below, I'd like htcw_bits to have its own CMakeLists.txt to export a target_include_directory as PUBLIC:

However, I cannot do it since there are no source files with the htcw_bits project - only headers. If I try add_library(htcw_bits), it will fail.

C++

add_library(htcw_io lib/htcw_io/src/io_stream.cpp)
target_include_directories(htcw_io PUBLIC
"${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/lib/htcw_bits/include"
"${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/lib/htcw_io/include"
"${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}")

Posted 25-Sep-23 18:20pm

honey the codewitch

Updated 2-Oct-23 5:10am

Deeksha Shenoy

v4

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honey the codewitch · Answer 1 · 2023-10-02T06:13:00

Solution 1

Declare using INTERFACE

add_library(htcw_bits INTERFACE)
target_include_directories(htcw_bits INTERFACE
    "${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/include"
    "${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}"
)

Posted 2-Oct-23 6:13am

honey the codewitch