How to set up googleTest as a shared library on Linux

Question

Debian does not provide any precompiled packages for gTest anymore. They suggest you integrate the framework into your project\'s makefile. But I want to keep my makefile cl

Answer 1

Update for Debian/Ubuntu

Google Mock (package: google-mock) and Google Test (package: libgtest-dev) have been merged. The new package is called googletest. Both old names are still available for backwards compatibility and now depend on the new package googletest.

So, to get your libraries from the package repository, you can do the following:

sudo apt-get install googletest -y
cd /usr/src/googletest
sudo mkdir build
cd build
sudo cmake ..
sudo make
sudo cp googlemock/*.a googlemock/gtest/*.a /usr/lib

After that, you can link against -lgmock (or against -lgmock_main if you do not use a custom main method) and -lpthread. This was sufficient for using Google Test in my cases at least.

If you want the most current version of Google Test, download it from github. After that, the steps are similar:

git clone https://github.com/google/googletest
cd googletest
sudo mkdir build
cd build
sudo cmake ..
sudo make
sudo cp lib/*.a /usr/lib

As you can see, the path where the libraries are created has changed. Keep in mind that the new path might be valid for the package repositories soon, too.

Instead of copying the libraries manually, you could use sudo make install. It "currently" works, but be aware that it did not always work in the past. Also, you don't have control over the target location when using this command and you might not want to pollute /usr/lib.