CMakeRC - A CMake-Based Resource Compiler

This projects provides a single CMake module, CMakeRC.cmake which can be used to add compile arbitrary files into binaries, and then load and read from them at runtime. Learn more here.

Installing

Installing CMakeRC is meant to be as simple as possible. The only thing required is the CMakeRC.cmake script. You can copy it into your project directory or install it as a package and get all the features you need.

Usage

1. Once installed, simply import the CMakeRC.cmake script. If you installed it as a package, use find_package(CMakeRC). If you placed the module in your project directory, simply use include(CMakeRC.cmake) to import the module.

2. Once included, create a new resource library using cmrc_add_resource_library, like this:

   cmrc_add_resource_library(my-resources ...)

   Where ... is simply a list of files that you wish to compile into the resource library.

3. To use the resource library, link the resource library target into a binary using target_link_libraries():

   add_executable(my-program main.cpp)
   target_link_libraries(my-program PRIVATE my-resources)

4. Inside of the source files, any time you wish to use the library, include the cmrc/cmrc.hpp header, which will automatically become available to any target that linkes to a generated resource library target, as my-program does above:

   #include <cmrc/cmrc.hpp>
   
   int main() {
       // ...
   }

5. Before reading any of the compiled-in resources, call CMRC_INIT() with the identifier-ified name of the resource library. (The identifier-ified name is the name with all non-alphanumeric characters convered to underscores):

   int main() {
       CMRC_INIT(my_resources);
   }

6. Call cmrc::open() with the path to any compiled-in resources, and you will get an instance of cmrc::resource which exposes begin() and end() functions for accessing the data using simple char pointers.

7. Profit!

Additional Options

After calling cmrc_add_resource_library, you can add additional resources to the library using cmrc_add_resources with the name of the library and the paths to any additional resources that you wish to compile in. This way you can lazily add resources to the library as your configure script runs.

Both cmrc_add_resource_library and cmrc_add_resources take two additional keyword parameters:

• WHENCE tells CMakeRC how to rewrite the filepaths to the resource files. The default value for WHENCE is the CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR, which is the source directory where cmrc_add_resources or cmrc_add_resource_library is called. For example, if you say cmrc_add_resources(foo images/flower.jpg), the resource will be accessible via cmrc::open("images/flower.jpg"), but if you say cmrc_add_resources(foo WHENCE images images/flower.jpg), then the resource will be accessible only using cmrc::open("flower.jpg"), because the images directory is used as the root where the resource will be compiled from.

  Because of the file transformation limitations, WHENCE is required when adding resources which exist outside of the source directory, since CMakeRC will not be able to automatically rewrite the file paths.

• PREFIX tells CMakeRC to prepend a directory-style path to the resource filepath in the resulting binary. For example, cmrc_add_resources(foo PREFIX resources images/flower.jpg) will make the resource accessible using cmrc::open("resources/images/flower.jpg"). This is useful to prevent resource libraries from having conflicting filenames. The default PREFIX is to have no prefix.

The two options can be used together to rewrite the paths to your heart's content:

cmrc_add_resource_library(
  flower-images
  WHENCE images
  PREFIX flowers
  images/rose.jpg
  images/tulip.jpg
  images/daisy.jpg
  images/sunflower.jpg
)

int foo() {
  auto rose = cmrc::open("flowers/rose.jpg");
}