How to build google protobuf environment with cmake on windows?

Question

I am following the instructions from:

https://github.com/google/protobuf/tree/master/cmake

cmake -G "NMake Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=../../../../install/protobuf ../..

nmake install

In my program's CMakeLists.txt i use:

find_package(Protobuf REQUIRED)

But it tells me:

-- Could NOT find Protobuf (missing:  Protobuf_LIBRARIES Protobuf_INCLUDE_DIR)

I think I should set set the environment variable.

Is there a effective way to do this?

in protobuf-master/cmake/install.cmake i can see this:

configure_file(protobuf-config.cmake.in
  ${CMAKE_INSTALL_CMAKEDIR}/protobuf-config.cmake @ONLY)
configure_file(protobuf-config-version.cmake.in
  ${CMAKE_INSTALL_CMAKEDIR}/protobuf-config-version.cmake @ONLY)
configure_file(protobuf-module.cmake.in
  ${CMAKE_INSTALL_CMAKEDIR}/protobuf-module.cmake @ONLY)
configure_file(protobuf-options.cmake
  ${CMAKE_INSTALL_CMAKEDIR}/protobuf-options.cmake @ONLY)

Can these files set the environment variable? And how can I use them?

Answer 1

I prefer to build 3rd party libraries as static libs in the build tree of my project.

I have created a cmake library to help with this. protobuf is one of the first libraries I have supported. The documentation is sparse so either feel free to ask questions or just learn from the code in the file cmake/require_protobuf.cmake

library is here: https://github.com/madmongo1/sanity

If you feel like contributing, I'd be grateful.

You will see that the script performs 2 builds. One to build protoc on the build machine, the next to build the protobuf libraries for the target machine.