Building software with CMake Compact Course: Building software with CMake

• Date: 09.07.2025
• Time: 9am - 1pm
• Instructor: Dr. Dominic Kempf, Research Software Engineer, Scientific Software Center
• Venue: Mathematikon Bauteil A, Im Neuenheimer Feld 205, in the conference room 5/104 on the 5th floor

This is a half day course.

Participants should have a basic understanding of the Unix shell e.g. be able to execute commands and edit files. Also, they should have either developed or build software written in a compiled language (e.g. C++, C or Fortran) before.

CMake has emerged as the de facto standard tool to manage the build process of software developed in compiled languages. It allows to describe the complex build configuration in a descriptive manner and thus enables flexibility, portability, scalability and robustness of the build process. In this course, we will first cover CMake from the end user perspective and learn how to build software that already provides a CMake build system. In the second part, we will dive into how to write a CMake build system for our own software. Special emphasis is put on explaining the principles of “Modern CMake” - a set of best practices to get more milage out of the tool.

After this course the participants 

• Understand the fundamental concepts and terminologies in CMake
• Be able to build software with CMake
• Know the fundamentals of writing CMake build systems for software

There is an instance of this course scheduled: Signup for the next schedule