AUI Boot

AUI Boot is yet another package manager based on CMake. If a library uses CMake and it can be pulled using git clone, AUI Boot in 99% cases can provide it for you into your project. It downloads the library, compiles it and places it in ~/.aui folder for future reuse.

Importing AUI

file(
    DOWNLOAD 
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aui-framework/aui/master/aui.boot.cmake 
    ${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/aui.boot.cmake)
include(${CMAKE_CURRENT_BINARY_DIR}/aui.boot.cmake)
auib_import(
    AUI https://github.com/aui-framework/aui 
    COMPONENTS core views)
 
aui_link(YOUR_APP PUBLIC aui::core
                         aui::views)

Importing 3rdparty libraries

You can import any library that can be imported to your project by compiling it using CMake and finding it's package with find_package, i.e. Sentry:

# importing Sentry with AUI.Boot
auib_import(sentry https://github.com/getsentry/sentry-native
            CMAKE_ARGS -DSENTRY_BACKEND=crashpad)
target_link_libraries(YOUR_APP PUBLIC sentry::sentry)

For more libraries, please visit https://github.com/aui-framework/boot.

Importing project as a subdirectory

-DAUIB_LIB_AS=ON

, where 'LIB' is external project name. For example, to import AUI as a subdirectory:

-DAUIB_AUI_AS=ON

CMake commands

auib_import

If needed, downloads and compiles project. Adds an IMPORTED target. Built on top of find_package.

Signature

auib_import(<PackageName> <URL>
            [ADD_SUBDIRECTORY]
            [ARCHIVE]
            [COMPONENTS components...]
            [CONFIG_ONLY]
            [CMAKE_WORKING_DIR workingdir.txt]
            [CMAKELISTS_CUSTOM cmakelist]
            [PRECOMPILED_URL_PREFIX <PrecompiledUrlPrefix>]
            [LINK <STATIC|SHARED>]
            [REQUIRES dependencies...]
            [VERSION version])

PackageName

Specifies the package name which will be passed to find_package.

URL

URL to the git repository of the project you want to import.

ADD_SUBDIRECTORY

Uses add_subdirectory instead of find_package as project importing mechanism as if AUIB_<PackageName>_AS was specified.

ARCHIVE

The provided URL is pointing to zip archive instead of a git repository.

For large dependencies, this might be faster than pulling whole repository.

CONFIG_ONLY

Forces find_package to use the config mode only.

VERSION

Commit hash, tag or branch name to checkout.

COMPONENTS

List of components to import which will be passed to find_package. Also, passed as semicolon-separated list to dependency's CMakeLists.txt via AUIB_COMPONENTS variable.

CMAKE_WORKING_DIR

Run cmake in specified directory, in relation to the pulled repo's root directory.

CMAKELISTS_CUSTOM

Replace/put the specified file from your project to the pulled repo's root directory as CMakeLists.txt.

This way you can customize the behavior of dependency's cmake.

PRECOMPILED_URL_PREFIX

Instead of building the dependency from sources, try to import the precompiled binaries first.

PrecompiledUrlPrefix

Specifies url prefix where the precompiled binaries downloaded from.

LINK

Overrides BUILD_SHARED_LIBS of the dependency, specifying SHARED or STATIC linking.

REQUIRES

List of the package dependencies. Every dependency's root variable (${DEPENDENCY}_ROOT) is checked for existence and validness, then it passed directly to auib_imported target (via ${DEPENDENCY}_ROOT).

It is useful when some package root is implicitly defined in your project somewhere and aui.boot does not know about it, thus does not forward.

Using same dependencies

Case 1

For example, your application uses aui.core module, which actually uses ZLIB:

When you also want to use ZLIB.

Without AUI.Boot, you'd place (and compile) another copy of ZLIB whose version may differ from ZLIB that aui.core uses, causing you to stuck with dependency hell:

With AUI.Boot, you'd not even use AUI.Boot's functions! Just use find_package(ZLIB REQUIRED) and link it to your application with target_link_libraries(YourApplication PRIVATE ZLIB::ZLIB), because AUI.Boot forwards location of used dependencies to your project. Your application and AUI are using the same ZLIB:

Case 2

Another case is OpenSSL between aui.crypt and aui.curl:

Because libcurl is not a part of AUI, it uses standard CMake's function to find OpenSSL (find_package).