If you are using prebuilt TGUI libraries, or if you have already built TGUI with CMake then you can let your project search for the existing files using find_package.
The two things that need to be added to your cmake script are finding TGUI and linking your project to it. To do this, simply call find_package with the required TGUI version and then call target_link_libraries to link with the TGUI::TGUI target. The target_link_libraries call will not only add the library to the linker, but also add the correct include directories to the project so that the TGUI header files can be found.
find_package(TGUI 1 REQUIRED)
target_link_libraries(DemoProject PRIVATE TGUI::TGUI)
If you have both static and dynamic TGUI libraries installed then you should set the TGUI_STATIC_LIBRARIES boolean property to select which library to link to. If you e.g. want to link statically then you would need to put the following line BEFORE calling find_package:
set(TGUI_STATIC_LIBRARIES TRUE)
If you pass REQUIRED to find_package then it will halt the cmake script and show an error when TGUI isn’t found. Otherwise you have to manually check whether TGUI_FOUND was set to TRUE or not.
When TGUI is installed, there should be a TGUIConfig.cmake file in the lib/cmake/TGUI subdirectory. If you built TGUI yourself (without installing it) then TGUIConfig.cmake should exist inside your build folder. In order to make CMake find TGUI, simply set the TGUI_DIR property (which is created when find_package fails) to the path in which the TGUIConfig.cmake can be found.
Note that CMake can also complain about not finding TGUI when it fails to find one of TGUI’s dependencies. The exact error message will be different in this case. The backends tutorial contain information about the properties that you need to set to help CMake find the dependencies when it can’t find them automatically.
If you want to download and build TGUI together with your project instead of first building TGUI separately, then you can use CMake’s FetchContent module.
Before calling FetchContent_MakeAvailable, you should set some properties that choose how TGUI is build. These are the same properties that are explained at the top of the Building TGUI from source code with CMake tutorial. The target_link_libraries call will not only add the library to the linker, but also add the correct include directories to the project so that the TGUI header files can be found.
include(FetchContent)
# Set properties that will be used while building TGUI
set(BUILD_SHARED_LIBS OFF) # Determines whether TGUI build a static or dynamic/shared library
set(TGUI_BACKEND SDL_RENDERER) # Sets which backend TGUI will use
FetchContent_Declare(
TGUI
GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/texus/TGUI
GIT_TAG v1.4.0 # Change this to wanted version
)
FetchContent_MakeAvailable(TGUI)
target_link_libraries(DemoProject PRIVATE TGUI::TGUI)