How to properly setup googleTest on OS X aside from XCode

Question

How do I setup gTest, so that I can link aganist the library? I will code in vim, so I just want to install the libraries, unlike the XCode setup. Goal is to be able to link

Answer 1

Before you start make sure your have read and understood this note from Google! This tutorial makes using gtest easy, but may introduce nasty bugs.

1. Get the googletest framework

$ wget https://github.com/google/googletest/archive/release-1.8.0.zip

Or get it by hand. I guess I won't manitain this little How-to, so if you stumbled upon it and the links are outdated, feel free to edit it.

2. Unzip and build google test

$ unzip gtest-1.8.0.zip
$ cd gtest-1.8.0
$ ./configure
$ make

3. "Install" the headers and libs on your system.

$ sudo cp -a include/gtest /usr/include
$ sudo cp -a lib/.libs/* /usr/lib/

gTestframework is now ready to use. Just don't forget to link your project against the library by setting -lgtest as linker flag and optionally, if you did not write your own test mainroutine, the explicit -lgtest_main flag.

From here on you might want to go to Googles documentation about the framework to learn how it works. Happy coding!