CMake is a build system generator that can create, e.g., Makefiles for UNIX and Mac or Visual Studio project files for Windows.
CMake provides an extensive documentation explaining available features and use cases as well as an FAQ section. It's recommended to use the latest stable CMake version available.
cmake --help is also a good first step to see available options and usage information.
CMake uses an out-of-source build, i.e., compiled binaries and object files are separated from the source tree and located in another directory. Usually this directory is called
debug or whatever you prefer. From within this directory, run
cmake <path/to/SCIP> to configure your build, followed by
make to compile the code according to the current configuration (this assumes that you chose Linux Makefiles as CMake Generator). By default, SCIP searches for Soplex as LP solver. If SoPlex is not installed systemwide, the path to a CMake build directory of SoPlex must be specified (ie one that contains "soplex-config.cmake"). Alternatively, a different LP solver can be specified with the
LPS variable, see Modifying a CMake configuration and Available LP solver interfaces.
Afterwards, successive calls to
make are going to recompile modified source code, without requiring another call to
cmake. The initial configuration step checks your environment for available third-party libraries and packages and sets up the configuration accordingly, e.g., disabling support for GMP if not installed.
The generated executable and libraries are put in directories
lib respectively and will simply be named
libscip.so. This is different from the naming convention of the previous Makefile setup that appended the configuration details like OS and third party dependencies directly to the name of the binary or library. The CMake setup tries to follow the established Linux/UNIX compilation conventions to facilitate the use of the libraries in other applications. The previously generated sub-libraries like
libobjscip.so are not created by default anymore. They can be built using the respective targets
libobjscip, etc. The main library
libscip.so will contain all SCIP sources and won't have dependencies to the other sub-libs.
There are several options that can be passed to the
cmake <path/to/SCIP> call to modify how the code is built. For all of these options and parameters you have to use
-D<Parameter_name>=<value>. Following a list of available options, for the full list run
|CMake option||Available values||Makefile equivalent||Remarks|
|CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE||Release, Debug, ...||OPT=[opt, dbg]|
|LPS||spx, cpx, grb, xprs, ...||LPS=...||See Available LP solver interfaces for a complete list|
|GMP||on, off||GMP=[true, false]|
|READLINE||on, off||READLINE=[true, false]|
|ZIMPL||on, off||ZIMPL=[true, false]|
|SHARED||on, off||SHARED=[true, false]|
|COVERAGE||on, off||–||use with gcc, lcov, gcov in debug mode|
|COVERAGE_CTEST_ARGS||ctest argument string||–||see |
Parameters can be set all at once or in subsequent calls to
cmake - extending or modifying the existing configuration.
There is an extensive test suite written for CTest, that may take a while to complete. To perform a quick test to see whether the compilation was really successful you may run
make check. To see all available tests, run
If Criterion is installed (set custom path with
-DCRITERION_DIR=<path>) the target
unittests can be used to compile and run the available unit tests.
A coverage report for the entire test suite can be generated. This requires a modification of the compilation process. Two variables govern the report generation,
COVERAGE_CTEST_ARGS. It is recommended to use the Debug build type.
In this example, coverage is enabled in combination with the build type Debug. In addition, only the coverage for tests with "MIP" in the name are run, excluding those that have "stein" in the name. The tests are performed in parallel using 4 cores.
coverage target, e.g.,
make coverage, to build the coverage report. The generated report can be found under "coverage/index.html".
CMake uses a default directory for installation, e.g., /usr/local on Linux. This can be modified by either changing the configuration using
-DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX as explained in Modifying a CMake configuration or by setting the environment variable
DESTDIR during or before the install command, e.g.,
DESTDIR=<custom/install/dir> make install.
There are several further targets available, which can be listed using
make help. For instance, there are some examples that can be built with
make examples or by specifying a certain one:
|scip||build SCIP executable|
|applications||build executables for all applications|
|examples||build executables for all examples|
|unittests||build unit tests||the Criterion package, see Testing with CTest|
|all_executables||build all of the above|
|libscip||build the SCIP library|
|install||install SCIP, see Installation|
|coverage||run the test suite and create a coverage report||build flag |
|liblpi||build the LPI library|
|libnlpi||build the NLPI library|
|libobjscip||build the ObjSCIP library for the C++ wrapper classes|