Tutorial

It is really easy to develop applications against SCF. One either has to compile and generate artifacts from SCF and create an application that links against them.

Develop With SCF

SCF provides CMake utility scripts to simplify developing applications or libraries that depend on SCF. All the developer needs is an SCF build and Suil Project Template.

This tutorial assumes you have SCF binaries downloaded to $(pwd)/scf/artifacts

1. Clone the template repo to a directory with your desired project name

   git clone https://github.com/dccarter/suil-template hello-world
   cd hello-world
   rm -rf .git
   

2. Build the template hello-world project

   # Launch project in a docker container
   docker run -it --rm --name suil-dev \
       -v $(pwd)/scf/artifacts:/home/scf/artifacts \
       -v $(pwd)/hello-world:/home/scf/hello-world \
       -w /home/scf/hello-world \
       suilteam/remote:ubuntu bash
   # Build the project
   mkdir -p build
   cd build
   cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Debug -DSUIL_BASE_PATH=/home/scf/artifacts
   make deps -j4
   make
   # Execute the built hello world app
   ./hello-world
   # Outputs-> global: Hello World! This is suil world
   

3. The template contains the following files. Note that these files are for reference only

   File/Directory	Description
   3rdParty.cmake	This file contains 3rdParty projects not exported within SCF package but needed to build dependent applications
   .gitattributes	This file is not needed to build suil, but it will help github highlight .scc files as C++ files
   .gitignore	Not needed for the build but it is what I use as my .gitignore file
   src	This folder contains the source code of the app or library
   test	his folder contains unit testing source code.
   CMakeLists.txt	Contains the code that drives CMake. There is nothing special in this file

The following is the listing for the CMakeLists.txt template file. It uses Suil.cmake to configure an application

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project(hello-word LANGUAGES C CXX)

This is the line that declares the name of the project. Change this to whatever you wish to name your project (See CMake Project for more info)

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set(SUIL_BASE_PATH "" CACHE STRING "The root path when SCF is installed")
if (SUIL_BASE_PATH)
    set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH} ${SUIL_BASE_PATH}/lib/cmake)
endif()

Do not change this code block unless you know what you are doing. The code includes scf artifacts in the module lookup path for CMake. (See CMAKE_MODULE_PATH for more info)

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include(Suil)

This includes Suil.cmake from scf artifacts. This script provides CMake utility functions/macros used in this project.

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# Create a suil project
SuilProject(hello-world
        SUIL_LIBS Base)

This will initialize the project declared in line #2. This function should only be invoked once with the name of the project. SuilProject is a function provided by suil and includes most of the CMake code that would be needed to setup an SCF project. See SuilProject for how to use the function

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# Create an application target
SuilApp(hello-world
    SOURCES   src/main.cpp
    LIBRARIES Suil::Base
    INSTALL   ON)

This code block will create an executable target. The parameters to given SuilApp are self explanatory. See SuilApp for all the supported parameters.

Conclusion

Using this template and Suil.cmake is not a requirement in developing SCF apps/libraries. Any developer familiar with CMake can rollout a project that depends on suil in a matter of minutes without using the helper script and the template.

Also note that there is nothing special about the CMakeLists.txt included in the template. If the target project needs what’s more that provided by Suil.cmake, any other requirements can still be added in the CMakeLists.txt.