Projects often depend on other projects and libraries. This chapter demonstrates how to detect external libraries, frameworks, and projects and how to link to these. CMake has a rather extensive set of prepackaged modules to detect the most commonly used libraries and programs, such as Python and Boost, for example. You can get a list of existing modules using cmake --help-module-list. However, not all libraries and programs are covered and from time to time you will have to provide your own detection scripts. In this chapter, we will discuss the necessary tools and discover the find family of CMake commands:
- find_file to find a full path to a named file
- find_library to find a library
- find_package to find and load settings ...
