anvil is an assistant for your cmake to bootstrap a new C++ project and to manage its build workflow.

CMake is the de-facto build system for C++ projects and it becomes more dominant in the community.

However, CMake is not friendly to novice to get started, and even for users who use cmake frequently, it is still kinda tedious to setup necessary cmake files for a new project; let alone using cmake to manage your dependencies.

anvil tries to improve your user experience in using CMake by providing features like:

• bootstrapping a new project out of a configured template.
• an out-of-box lightweight dependency manager for medium-sized projects.
• built-in building scripts for various platforms

• OS: any OS that meets following requirements
• Python 3
• CMake 3.14 or higher (our built-in dependency manager relies on fetch-content module)

1. Clone the project and cd into the directory

2. Run pip install -r requirements.txt and to make sure pip here referes to the Python 3 version.

3. Make sure anvil/launcher/anvil.bat accessible in your PATH on Windows; and

   make sure anvil/launcher/anvil accessible in your PATH on other platforms.

4. Run anvil --help to verify the installation.

Create the directory Demo for your new project and copy file anvil/scaffolds/project_rules.toml to somewhere (it is ok to place it into the Demo directory)

Edit the project_rules.toml and make it meet your requirements.

Then:

cd Demo
anvil init "path/to/your/project_rules.toml"

Anvil would now create folders and whatever requested for you.

You can either use CMake commands directly to generate build files and then build your project; or you can use build.py which provides simpler commands for generating and building.

Run python3 build.py --help for details.

We use CPM.cmake as our default dependency management.