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

I was similarly underwhelmed by this situation and ended up making my own Ubuntu source packages for this. These source packages allow you to easily produce a binary package. They are based on the latest gtest & gmock source as of this post.

Google Test DEB Source Package

Google Mock DEB Source Package

To build the binary package do this:

tar -xzvf gtest-1.7.0.tar.gz
cd gtest-1.7.0
dpkg-source -x gtest_1.7.0-1.dsc
cd gtest-1.7.0
dpkg-buildpackage

It may tell you that you need some pre-requisite packages in which case you just need to apt-get install them. Apart from that, the built .deb binary packages should then be sitting in the parent directory.

For GMock, the process is the same.

As a side note, while not specific to my source packages, when linking gtest to your unit test, ensure that gtest is included first (https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=156639) This seems like a common gotcha.