Vcpkg static linking

me@iany.me (Ian Yang) — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 12:13:07 +0800

Vcpkg is a tool published by Microsoft, which is used to manage C/C++ libraries in Windows. It makes libraries installation easier, and it works well with CMake.

But it is not straitforward to staticly link the depdendent libraries using vcpkg.

Under Linux，static linking just need to use .a files instead of .so files (similar in macOS). Use boost as an example, the bundled FindBoost returns found static library files in Boost_LIBRARIES when setting following flags.

set(Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS ON)
set(Boost_USE_STATIC_RUNTIME ON)

Then just use Boost_LIBRARIES in link_libraries or target_link_libraries to statically link boost.

But when these two flags are set in Windows using vcpkg, CMake will complain that it cannot find static libraries of boost. It seems a constraint of VC compiler, so vcpkg requires install the static version of libraries explicitly. For example, to install boost static 64bit libraries:

vcpkg install zlib:x64-windows-static

And VCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET is required to generate VC project:

cmake .. \
-DCMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/path/to/vcpkg.cmake \
-DVCPKG_TARGET_TRIPLET=x64-windows-static \
-G "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64"

But the project generated throws error in linking. It can be fixed referring this Stack Overflow thread: CMake compile with /MT instead of /MD. Here is the final CMake sample:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.0)
project(static_link_test CXX)
set(CMAKE_CXX_STANDARD 11)
if(MSVC)
string(REPLACE "/MD" "/MT" CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS})
string(REPLACE "/MD" "/MT" CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_DEBUG})
string(REPLACE "/MD" "/MT" CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE ${CMAKE_CXX_FLAGS_RELEASE})
else(MSVC)
set(Boost_USE_STATIC_LIBS ON)
set(Boost_USE_STATIC_RUNTIME ON)
endif(MSVC)
find_package(Boost 1.36.0 REQUIRED COMPONENTS filesystem program_options)
include_directories(
${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/src
${Boost_INCLUDE_DIRS}
)
link_libraries(
${Boost_LIBRARIES}
)
add_executable(static_link_test
src/main.cpp
)
install(TARGETS static_link_test RUNTIME DESTINATION bin)

~iany/ C++

Vcpkg static linking