Building of executable and shared library with cmake, runtimelinker does not find dll

Question

I am working with gcc(cygwin), gnu make, windows 7 and cmake.

my cmake testprojekt has the following structure

rootdir
|-- App
|   |-- app.cpp
|   +-         


        

Answer 1

I discovered (what I believe to be) quite a nice way of handling this. It follows the approach of adding the .dll to the same directory as the .exe. You can do it in CMake like so:

if (WIN32)
# copy the .dll file to the same folder as the executable
add_custom_command(
    TARGET  POST_BUILD
    COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy_directory
    $>
    $)
endif()

where app-target is the name of the application or library you're building (created through add_executable or add_library) and lib-target is the imported library brought in with find_package.

# full example
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.14)

project(my-app-project VERSION 0.0.1 LANGUAGES CXX)

find_package(useful-library REQUIRED)

add_executable(my-application main.cpp)

target_link_libraries(my-application PUBLIC useful-library::useful-library)

if (WIN32)
# copy the .dll file to the same folder as the executable
add_custom_command(
    TARGET my-application POST_BUILD
    COMMAND ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy_directory
    $
    $)
endif()