Can CMake generate a configure file?

Question

I need the configure file to transpile from C++ to JS, I'm trying to use emscripten in a project. Emscripten comes with a tool called emconfigure, that replaces the autoconf configure,

But the project I'm building uses cmake as build system and currently (Jan-12) emscripten has only support for autoconf - so I'm bypassing it by generating the configure and doing a port on the make, so there a way to create the configure file from the cmake ?? I'm not talking about the make files.. but the configure file itself.

By the way you want to translate the language. Can you be more specific? — Neox
This question is unclear. CMake cannot generate a script called configure in the way that autoconf does - it works differently to do a similar job. But it can do configuration operations upon files in the source tree. What language translation is being done? What has emscripte got to do with anything? — mabraham

ollo ollo · Accepted Answer · 2014-10-04T14:02:00

Yes, it can:

configure_file(<input> <output>
               [COPYONLY] [ESCAPE_QUOTES] [@ONLY]
               [NEWLINE_STYLE [UNIX|DOS|WIN32|LF|CRLF] ])

Example.h.in

#ifndef EXAMPLE_H
#define EXAMPLE_H

/*
 * These values are automatically set according to their cmake variables.
 */
#define EXAMPLE "${EXAMPLE}"
#define VERSION "${VERSION}"
#define NUMBER  ${NUMBER}

#endif /* EXAMPLE_H */

In your cmake file:

set(EXAMPLE "This is an example")
set(VERSION "1.0")
set(NUMBER 3)

configure_file(Example.h.in Example.h)

Configured Example.h:

#ifndef EXAMPLE_H
#define EXAMPLE_H

/*
 * These values are automatically set according to their cmake variables.
 */
#define EXAMPLE "This is an example"
#define VERSION "1.0"
#define NUMBER  3

#endif /* EXAMPLE_H */

Documentation:

Can CMake generate a configure file?

4 Answers