Question

I have a project organized as follows:

• include/
• src/
• share/myprogram/

where share/myprogram/ contains resources.
My program is accessing these resources using relative paths. The executable expects to find them in ../share/myprogram/.

I would like when I run:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make

to have the following to happen:

• make a bin directory
• compile and put the executable in bin/
• copy the share directory in the build directory

I am looking for a clean way of doing this. Ideally, I would like CMake to be aware of the resources as resources.
I know that I could use a copy custom command. Is this the only way to achieve this?

Bonus

If the resources could appear under Resources in Xcode when using the Xcode generator, and the copy be a clean copy phase under the mybin target, that would be awesome (and that’s what I mean by CMake being aware of the resources as resources.)

---

Update:

What I have thus far:

set(CMAKE_RUNTIME_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/bin)
add_executable(mybin ${Headers} ${Sources})

add_custom_target(
    Resources ALL
    ${CMAKE_COMMAND} -E copy_directory ${PROJECT_SOURCE_DIR}/share ${PROJECT_BINARY_DIR}/share
    SOURCES ${Resources}
)

Answer 1

I am doing a unix command line tool, I am not doing a Mac OS X bundle and Xcode’s resource folder is only for bundle resources so forget the bonus.

I realized that I wasn’t doing things correctly.
Using a relative path to access a resource is not reliable since the program can be executed from anywhere.
What I did is to look for resources in a hierarchy of folder, starting from user specified, to environment variable, to relative directories and finally to standard unix directories.

So actually, the copy phase during the build is not necessary anymore. Only the installation matters and that is fairly easy:

install(DIRECTORY share/ DESTINATION share)

FYI, I kept my custom_target as is since I like having resources visible in Xcode, and calling it Resources makes it pretty 🙂