How to Add Linux Compilation to Cmake Project in Visual Studio

Question

Visual Studio has added lots of new features for C++ in the past year.

CMake With the CMake support, I can do "Open Folder" and select a folder with a CMakeLists.txt file in it. Visual Studio does a lot of nice work in discovering and building it automatically.

Linux Compilation Visual studio now supports remote compilation on Linux over SSH. Several tutorials show how users can create a new "Linux Console Application" in Visual Studio, and it will automatically ask to setup an SSH connection to be used for building it. I don't see any instructions for how to do this on an existing project of any kind.

Particularly with a CMake project, is it possible to open a CMake folder in Visual Studio 2017 and have it built over on a remote Linux machine? IfSoHow?

Answer 1

There is no build-in support for a VS "Linux Console Application" in CMake yet (as for CMake version 3.9).

Edit: Visual Studio 2017 15.4 now comes with something similar without generating actual .vcxproj files. See Visual C++ for Linux Development with CMake

With a standard CMake version besides the possibilities described here using existing .vcxproj files as a template, you can only trick CMake into generating those project types:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.7)

project(HelloLinux)

file(WRITE main.cpp [=[
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    std::cout << "Hello from Linux Console!" << std::endl;
}
]=])

add_executable(HelloLinux "main.cpp")

set_target_properties(
    HelloLinux
    PROPERTIES
        VS_GLOBAL_KEYWORD "Linux"
        VS_GLOBAL_ApplicationType "Linux"
        VS_GLOBAL_ApplicationTypeRevision "1.0"
        VS_GLOBAL_TargetLinuxPlatform "Generic"
        VS_GLOBAL_LinuxProjectType "{D51BCBC9-82E9-4017-911E-C93873C4EA2B}"
)

This actually works and produces a Linux .vcxproj project that is accepted by VS. But since we sidestepped CMake here, none of the other compiler/linker options you define in your CMake script will be assigned.

So my recommendation is to raise a feature request for CMake itself to directly support this (e.g. via platform toolset option Remote_GCC_1_0).