Please export() the CMake targets and add include directories to them

[rix0rrr]

Hi,

I'd like to consume the SDK from my own CMake project without having to install it (I detest having to install libraries into my global system directories just to compile against them).

Fortunately, CMake makes it quite easy to consume a library that's also built with CMake from its build directory, if you prep the CMakeLists file correctly.

I'd just need two things:

• Specify the include directories for each module--and I could live without those because I can fix those in my own CMakeLists file.
• But the thing that I really need, is that you export() the targets in your top-level CMakeLists file.

The command looks like this:

export(TARGETS
    aws-cpp-sdk-s3
    aws-cpp-sdk-core
    ...
    FILE AwsCppSdkConfig.cmake)

Given this, if I build my project with:

cmake -DAwsCppSdk_DIR=/path/to/aws-sdk-cpp/build

Then in my own CMake file I can do this:

find_package(AwsCppSdk)
# Fix up the include directories of the targets that I found (wouldn't need to do this if you did it)
set_property(TARGET aws-cpp-sdk-core PROPERTY INTERFACE_INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES ${AwsCppSdk_DIR}/../aws-cpp-sdk-core/include)
set_property(TARGET aws-cpp-sdk-s3 PROPERTY INTERFACE_INCLUDE_DIRECTORIES ${AwsCppSdk_DIR}/../aws-cpp-sdk-s3/include)

And now I can simply target_link_libraries against the libraries without having to specify anything else (transitive include and linker dependencies will be taken care of for me by CMake).

I'm in the process of compiling a guide to the most effective CMake usage. You can find it here:

http://rix0r.nl/blog/2015/08/13/cmake-guide/

[rix0rrr]

It should suffice to add the following command to set every module's includes to take care of the include directories problem:

target_include_directories(aws-cpp-sdk-something PUBLIC
    $<BUILD_INTERFACE:${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/include>
    $<INSTALL_INTERFACE:include>
    PRIVATE src)   # Only if you have private headers

[JonathanHenson]

Thanks for this. We will very likely add this very soon.

[JonathanHenson]

Sorry for the delay. I just added this to our backlog and will be implementing it soon.

[JonathanHenson]

I just pushed an update for this. Could you have a look and let me know if that works for you?
Also, I haven't added header file paths yet, would you still prefer the solution you posted to that before?

[JonathanHenson]

Thank you for your advice on this. I just pushed an implementation and I am very happy with how this turned out. Build script will look like cmake -Daws-sdk-cpp_DIR=./aws-sdk-cpp/build

I'll be uploading a blog post in the near future to help folks take advantage of this.