Gtk with CMake

September 29, 2020

Recently I wanted to write a small GTK application. As my favorite language is C++, I wanted to use that language. GTK or better GNOME propose Meson as a build system. However since I have worked a lot with CMake and fine with it, I wanted to use CMake as my build system. Another thing that speaks for CMake, is the fact that it is used by a lot of other C++ projects, so it easy to integrate them.

A problem that I faced when using the CMake build system, was that I somehow needed to generate the resources file for the user interface. While searching the internet, I was not able to find a solution to this problem, so I wanted to post my solution here. I basically defined a custom command. If there is a better solution, I like to hear from you and yes I know the use of GLOB_RECURSE is evil but I found it too convenient and had never real trouble with it.

project(shaderviewer CXX)

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.18.0)

set(CMAKE_MODULE_PATH ${CMAKE_MODULE_PATH} "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/")

find_package(PkgConfig)
pkg_check_modules(GTKMM gtkmm-3.0)

set(RESOURCES "${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/resources.cpp")

add_custom_command(
  OUTPUT ${RESOURCES}
  COMMAND glib-compile-resources
            --target=resources.cpp
            --generate-source
            ../app/shaderviewer.gresource.xml
            --sourcedir=../app
  COMMENT "Generating resources"
  WORKING_DIRECTORY "${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}"
  )

file(
  GLOB_RECURSE
  HEADER_LIST
  CONFIGURE_DEPENDS
  "app/*.hpp"
  )

file(
  GLOB_RECURSE
  SOURCE_LIST
  CONFIGURE_DEPENDS
  "app/*.cpp"
  )

add_executable(shaderviewer ${SOURCE_LIST} ${HEADER_LIST} ${RESOURCES})
target_compile_features(shaderviewer PUBLIC cxx_std_17)
target_include_directories(shaderviewer PRIVATE ${GTKMM_INCLUDE_DIRS})
target_link_directories(shaderviewer PRIVATE ${GTKMM_LIBRARY_DIRS})
target_link_libraries(shaderviewer PRIVATE ${GTKMM_LIBRARIES} epoxy)

I used the following directory structure:

app
cmake
CMakeLists.txt

The source code and xml resource files were stored in the app directory.