Question

I am writing a C++ library which can be used from both C++ and Python on Mac and Linux. So I have decided to use CMake and SWIG for my project.

As well described in the SWIG 2.0 documentation, combination of SWIG and CMake also works fine on my Mac.
http://www.swig.org/Doc2.0/SWIGDocumentation.html#Introduction_build_system

But I have a question about make install.

After typing cmake . and make, _example.so was successfully generated. But make install does not work, because the auto-generated Makefile does not have install target. I would like to know how I can add install target in the Makefile. I would like _example.so to be installed under site-packages directory on each system.

I would very appreciate it if anyone could tell me how to modify the CMake example written in the above link.

Answer 1

The CMake interface to make install is the CMake command install(). In your example, you could add an installation rule like this:

install(
  TARGETS ${SWIG_MODULE_example_REAL_NAME} 
  # ... add other arguments to install() as necessary
)

Once there are any install() commands in a CMakeList, CMake will generate an install target callable as make install.