Building a Binary Installer
CMake can easily build binary installers for a variety of
platforms. On Windows and Mac OS X, CMake builds graphical
installation programs. For other Unix operating systems, CMake
currently builds tarballs and self-installing shell scripts. This
CMake functionality, provided by the
CPack program
that is part of CMake, is used to create all of CMake’s binary
installers. We use CPack to build binary installers for Boost. To
build a binary installer for Boost, follow these steps:
- Build Boost using CMake. (see Quickstart)
- (‘’‘Windows only’‘’) Download and install the Nullsoft Scriptable
Install System (NSIS),
which is used to create graphical installers on Windows. Unix users
do not need to install any extra tools.
- Using the same development tools for building Boost, build the
“package” target to create the binary installers.
- With Microsoft Visual Studio, build the target named PACKAGE
- With makefiles, run ` make package``.
The output of the packaging process will be one or more binary
packages of the form Boost-version-platform.*extension*. The
type of package will differ from one platform to another:
- On Windows: The primary output is an executable (.exe) that
provides a graphical installer.
- On Mac OS X: The primary output is a disk image (.dmg) that
contains a graphical installer package.
- On Unix: Packaging produces compressed tarballs (.tar.gz) and
a self-installing shell script (.sh)
Windows installer:
Mac installer: