InstallToALocalFolderForTesting

This recipe is meant to install a local copy of all install files into a directory within the build directory. This is usually not needed in linux because you can use the rpath to set the location of libraries, but when doing cross-platform development (i.e. windows or cygwin), the files all need to be in the same directory. Now you can use CTest to call the programs without installing them to their destination. Here's the recipe:

add_custom_target(fake_install
    ALL
    "${CMAKE_COMMAND}"
    -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:string=${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/testdir
    -P "${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/cmake_install.cmake"
    DEPENDS Target1 Target2 Target2  )

Note that I had to manually set it to depend on all of my build system's targets to avoid situations where it would try to run the installer before finishing the build of everything else. Also worth noting is that this will run every time you "make all" and has a strange side effect of also running whenever doing "make install" (because the target is ALWAYS considered out of date), but that shouldn't be an issue. Note that I put this in my top level CMakeLists.txt. IF you put it somewhere else, you may need to use PROJECT_BINARY_DIR instead of CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR.

This page was initially populated by conversion from its original location in another wiki.