CMake and Conan based build environment

Prerequisites

Building boxes requires two tools to be installed:

Conan, a package manager for C/C++, is used to resolve required library and tool dependencies
- libunistring
- pcre2
- ncurses (official Conan 2 version should be available soon, see below)
- flex (library and tool)
- bison (tool)
- cmocka (for testing)
CMake is used for building.
Make sure that a C compiler and the tools for the underlying build environment (e.g., GNU Make or Ninja) are installed.

If Conan is used for the first time, start with the creation of a default profile:

conan profile detect

Note that testing is currently only available in Linux or MSYS!

Building boxes

It is recommended to use the generated presets for building. For a debug build, follow these steps:

export BUILD_TYPE="Debug"
export BUILD_PRESET="conan-debug"

conan install . --output-folder=./build/${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --settings build_type=${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --build missing

cmake -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}
cmake --build --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}

ctest --verbose --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}

Release build is similar:

export BUILD_TYPE="Release"
export BUILD_PRESET="conan-release"

conan install . --output-folder=./build/${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --settings build_type=${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --build missing

cmake -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}
cmake --build --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}

ctest --verbose --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}

Of course the "classic" way works, too:

export BUILD_TYPE="Debug"

conan install . --output-folder=./build/${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --settings build_type=${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --build missing

cmake -S ./ -B ./build/${BUILD_TYPE} \
    -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=${BUILD_TYPE} \
    -DCMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS=ON \
    -DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=conan_toolchain.cmake

cmake --build ./build/${BUILD_TYPE} \
    --config ${BUILD_TYPE}

ctest --test-dir ./build/${BUILD_TYPE} --verbose

Installing boxes

First start with providing the Conan packages like described in the building boxes section. Then you can do the following to install the boxes:

...
export INSTALL_DIR="./dist"
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${INSTALL_DIR} --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}
cmake --build --preset ${BUILD_PRESET} --target install

${INSTALL_DIR}/bin/boxes --help

Packaging boxes

The installation process is used for packaging. So the same prerequisites as for installing boxes have to be fulfilled. To create boxes packages, do the following:

...
cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=${INSTALL_DIR} --preset ${BUILD_PRESET}
cmake --build --preset ${BUILD_PRESET} --target package

Notes

ncurses

The Conan ncurses is in the last steps of being migrated from version 1 to version 2 (you can track the status). Unfortunately this means, that it cannot be used right out-of-the-box, and needs to be created into the local Conan cache manually first. Fortunately, it is rather easy to do this by following these steps:

# Create a directory where the recipes files are stored
mkdir -p ncurses
pushd ncurses

# Download the required files
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/valgur/conan-center-index/migrate/ncurses/recipes/ncurses/all/conandata.yml
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/valgur/conan-center-index/migrate/ncurses/recipes/ncurses/all/conanfile.py
mkdir -p cmake
pushd cmake
curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/valgur/conan-center-index/migrate/ncurses/recipes/ncurses/all/cmake/conan-official-ncurses-targets.cmake
popd

# Build the package
conan create . --version 6.4 --settings build_type=Debug --build missing
conan create . --version 6.4 --settings build_type=Release --build missing

popd

Terminal issues

There may occur terminal issues originating from ncurses. In case boxes is telling you something like terminals database is inaccessible, try to set the following environment variables:

# On Linux and MacOS
export TERMINFO=/usr/share/terminfo
# On WSL2 (Windows)
export TERMINFO=/lib/terminfo

# In case it is still not working, try (or another term like `xterm` or `xterm-color`)
export TERM=xterm-256color

Finally, note that if boxes: Can't find config file. the configuration file must be provided in an environment variable or as command line parameter:

# boxes-config as parameter
echo "hello, world" | boxes -f boxes-config

# boxes-config as environment variable
export BOXES=boxes-config
echo "hello, world" | boxes

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